


Race Like Falcons to Crash and Burn

by Linsky



Series: Wolfverse [8]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Angst, But not forever, Dylan is a failwolf, First Time, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, Really a lot of angst, Werewolf Bonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2019-12-29 22:34:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 74,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18303188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: It’s okay to be a wolf in the NHL now. That’s what everyone tells Dylan, anyway.(Can be read as a standalone)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, these two. They have had quite the journey. I wrote a [primer](https://linskywords.tumblr.com/post/183641034554/stromecat-primer) for them on tumblr if you want to know about it, but also, pretty much all that information is in this story, so you can just read if you'd like!
> 
> This is very very close to canon, except for the werewolf thing. (I mean, as far as I know. I don't know that they're NOT werewolves.) Also I may have fudged a full moon or two in there. :P
> 
> Many thanks to aohatsu for the enthusiasm and helpful feedback!!

It’s okay to be a wolf in the NHL now. That’s what everyone tells Dylan, anyway, and it seems to be pretty much true. He’s been out as a wolf since—well, he doesn’t think he’s ever really been in; he doesn’t make a point of telling people in, like, elementary school or whatever, but by the time he’s drafted to the Otters Patrick Kane and Sidney Crosby and Jamie Benn and everyone have been out for years, and there’s no reason not to tell his coach and his teammates and everyone. It makes everything so much easier. Staying in the closet would be—he has no idea how anyone would even deal with that.

The media doesn’t even give him flak for it. They get kind of into it, actually, and maybe it’s annoying getting questions about pack dynamics when Connor and Mitch are being asked about their role models or training methods or whatever, but Dylan knows he’s lucky. He’s the highest-drafted out wolf in NHL history; five years ago the idea of a known wolf being drafted in the top three would have been ridiculous. And then there’s the 2013 CBA with its unprecedented wolf protections, and maybe Dylan as an alpha doesn’t need the heat or pregnancy leave, but there are still a ton of ways they could get away with discriminating against him that they can’t now.

The best part is that he doesn’t even think he’ll need the protections in Arizona. Everyone is super nice and welcoming: the GM has a cousin who’s a wolf, and they have their PR guys do a profile on Dylan that mentions the wolf thing but also talks about other stuff for a change, and yeah, they send him down partway through the preseason, but that’s pretty normal the first year out.

Dylan thinks it might kind of suck going back to the Otters, with Connor in Edmonton. Especially since he has to move to a new billet. His family from last year moved far enough out that it’s hard to get to the rink from their house, and they decided it would be better if they didn’t keep hosting this year. Dylan wishes they’d asked him before deciding that; he would have been up for a longer drive to the rink in order to stay with the same family. It always takes forever to get used to the scents of a new place.

They move him into the same billet as Alex, though, and that’s unexpectedly awesome. Not that Dylan didn’t expect it to be awesome, but it’s even more awesome than he thought it would be. Alex is really good to hang out with, and he knows about Dylan’s cuddling thing from last year, so Dylan doesn’t even have to hesitate really before flopping against him while they’re watching stuff in the Ackermans’ TV room.

Okay, he maybe hesitates a little. But he still does it.

“This is a wolf thing, right?” Alex says the second or third time Dylan ends up draped against his side while they watch a game.

“Yeah,” Dylan says. And then, because maybe that’s Alex’s way of saying he doesn’t like it, he asks, “That okay?”

“Yeah, for sure,” Alex says, and leans into it a little.

So that’s okay, and it gets even better after that. Alex’s shoulder isn’t a great height for leaning: Alex is still hoping to grow, Dylan knows, but it hasn’t happened yet, and an eight-inch difference make it tough for Dylan to achieve a satisfying slump without getting a crick in his neck. So a lot of the time he ends up sprawling across Alex’s lap instead, pillowing his head on one of his thighs or letting his legs lie across him instead. Alex smells really good: nutty, somehow, walnuts or hazelnuts or something, with green undertones like cedar. He usually rests a hand on Dylan somewhere, too, and it’s just super great.

Dylan actually thinks it might make them better together on the ice. He doesn’t tell anyone that, because he knows it would sound like a weird woo-woo wolf thing, but they’re definitely playing better together than they ever did before. Like, it was great having Connor on the team, obviously, and Dylan would love to still have him around, but without him Dylan and Alex are locking in on each other at this new level. And maybe it has nothing to do with the couch cuddles, but Dylan figures he should keep them going anyway. Better not to risk it.

***

Dylan touches other people too, of course. There are all his other teammates. And he hooks up, which is a whole lot of touch all at once—but it’s stranger-touch, which is good in its own way but not the same as team-touch. Team-touch is almost like pack-touch.

The Ackermans aren’t really in that category yet, but they’ve been pretty chill about the wolf thing. They actually don’t even ask about it when Dylan moves in, which is maybe just them being cool but maybe they don’t know? Dylan figures that’s probably impossible—the press is always talking about it—but it still makes him nervous when it comes to the first full moon.

Dylan doesn’t _have_ to shift at the full moon. But it’s a struggle not to, and it’s really draining, and Dylan isn’t going to put himself through that if he’s not actively playing in a game at the time. He brings it up the morning before, when Mrs. Ackerman is in the kitchen for breakfast. “I might be out kind of late tomorrow night,” he says, and then tries to come up with something bland to say that doesn’t totally highlight the wolf thing but also doesn’t make it sound like he’s one of the guys who are always out partying. He knows some of the billets are really sensitive about that.

But Mrs. Ackerman just smiles right away. “Of course! The full moon, right?” So that’s okay, too.

Dylan’s always loved the full moon. He feels the pull a couple of days leading up to it, and gets snugglier than usual, and wants his pack around him all the time. Back in Mississauga that meant hanging out with his mom, the only other wolf in his family. Here it means getting together with the other guys who are out of high school, Petty and Darren and Marchy and Betzer, working out and getting up a collective endorphin high and then going out to lunch when everyone’s still warm and a little sweaty. It means everyone’s scent is a little heightened, that familiar blend that means belonging and team.

Dylan doesn’t tell the other guys about that last part. But he enjoys it a lot.

That’s how it goes for the October and November moons. The full moon night in December, though, they have a game.

It always sucks when this happens. It happened twice last year, and Dylan ended up white-knuckled on the bench the whole third period, fighting the desire to shift. He’s usually okay at not shifting if he’s in a bad place for it—but the game setting makes it really tough, full of scents, his own pack’s and an enemy’s, emotions getting into his nose and under his skin. It was worst on the ice, those times, where he had to fight super hard against getting caught up in the excitement and shifting without meaning to.

They wouldn’t have, like, fined him for it. They might not even have kicked him out of the game. But he definitely wouldn’t have gotten drafted third overall, if he seemed like a liability on the ice.

Maybe the stakes are lower this year, but they don’t feel like it. Arizona is watching. Plus Connor isn’t here: he knew about the full moon thing and was a big part of helping Dylan keep it under control. And Dylan’s captain this year; he can’t let the team down.

Dylan tries to be chill leading up to the game, but Alex seems to pick up on something being wrong. He talks more than usual in the car on the way over, joking, trying to get Dylan to laugh. But they’re only like four hours from peak fullness at that point, and Dylan’s already fighting for control, and he doesn’t even trust himself to say anything.

“Just, um, stay with me tonight, ’kay?” he manages to say as they go into the rink. Alex looks alarmed but does stick close to him while they’re changing, casting worried glances at Dylan when he thinks Dylan isn’t looking. It helps: his scent is grounding, familiar from weeks of quiet couch contact.

The game is a struggle, though. They fall behind in the second against Kitchener, and this big guy, Banks, keeps ending up in the face-off circle opposite Dylan. He’s not a wolf, of course—there still aren’t that many of them in the O—but he’s one of those humans that sets off Dylan’s instincts anyway, makes him think _alpha in the room._ “Hey, drooler,” Banks says when they line up in the second. “Shouldn’t you be out mauling innocents somewhere tonight?”

Dylan tightens his grip on his stick and doesn’t say anything. It’s always better not to say anything when they say shit like that.

“Nah, come on, isn’t it your night?” Banks says. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Dylan loses the face-off.

He’s still gritting his teeth when he gets back to the bench, and he can feel Alex watching him from next to him on the bench. Alex was on the edge of the circle; he probably heard when Banks was saying. It’s confirmed a minute later when Alex says, “Full moon night?”

Just hearing him say it makes Dylan’s instincts spike, the urge to shift—but it’s also a relief to have him know. To not feel like he has to hide it from everybody. Dylan nods, tightly.

Alex nods back, and presses his shoulder against Dylan’s, and it helps. It helps.

They lose the game by three goals, and Dylan doesn’t manage to score at all. The media talks to him for what feels like forever—they haven’t caught on to the full moon thing, fortunately, but they always love to make a big deal out of Dylan not scoring, like it signals a fatal downturn in production or whatever. He does his best to answer while wanting to crawl out of his skin. By the time he’s stripped and showered, he’s exhausted and hanging onto control by a thread.

He doesn’t even mean to end up near Alex. He heads toward him on autopilot instead of going to his own stall, and he doesn’t even realize it until he notices the way Alex is looking at him—like he’s worried, maybe, and fuck, Dylan needs to get himself under control. But: “Hey,” Alex says, tapping Dylan on the side when Dylan goes to retreat. “Drive you somewhere?”

Dylan wasn’t planning on that. He thought he’d go back to their billet and drop his stuff and then take his own car out. But if Alex is offering—“Yeah,” he says.

There’s a field he usually goes to, near his old billet. It’s not as convenient to their new place, but he’s stuck with it anyway: there aren’t that many designated wolf runs in the city, and it’s the only place Dylan knows that doesn’t have another alpha. He doesn’t want to be challenged when he’s just trying to run. He directs Alex there, and then even manages to say a few things about the game while twisting his fingers in the hem of his shirt.

“You want me to, like, get out with you?” Alex asks when they get there, and Dylan pauses with his hand on the door handle.

He wonders if Alex knows what he’s asking. Probably he wouldn’t offer if he did. Running with a wolf at the full moon is—it’s not strictly only for pack, but it usually means you’re thinking of becoming pack, and not in a team-is-sort-of-like-pack way. Not that Alex being there on the full moon would obligate him to anything. But it would be a bigger thing than Dylan is pretty sure Alex means to offer.

“Nah,” Dylan says. “But—if you want to hang out in the car for a few minutes. I’ll find my own way home, but, uh. If you want.”

It’s more than he meant to suggest, even if Alex isn’t going to get what it means. Dylan feels self-conscious, walking away from the car and into the woods. He would have changed in the trees anyway—not much fun to strip in an open field under the moonlight where someone could see and call the cops on you—but it feels different knowing that Alex is out there.

He’ll probably leave as soon as Dylan is out of sight. But when Dylan comes back out of the trees in his wolf form, Alex is still there, car dark.

It’s good to know he’s there. Dylan doesn’t think about it beyond that. His mind is different in wolf form: less complicated, in some ways. All he needs to know is that it’s the full moon, and he’s where he’s supposed to be, in the body he’s supposed to have. He turns and starts running.

*** 

Game against Kitchener aside, they’re having a good season. Especially Dylan and Alex’s line—they’re scoring like crazy, and the two of them get named to their respective World Juniors teams.

It’s pretty cool to get to do this. One of the perks of not being in the NHL yet, even if no one in their right mind would trade the NHL for it. “Man,” Marns says when they meet up in the hotel lobby. “It’s gonna suck not being on this team next year, you know? I guess I’ll just have to count on you to hold it down.”

Dylan shoves him into a rolling suitcase.

They aren’t rooming together, but Marns comes over once Dylan’s roommate wanders off in search of food with English-language nutrition facts. “So, you wanna wolf out?” Marns asks when he collapses on Dylan’s bed.

Dylan hasn’t shifted in front of anyone outside of his immediate family since Connor left. Sometimes the other Otters ask him about it, but it always feels like—he doesn’t want to become a pet for any of them. He doesn’t want them thinking of him as someone other than their leading scorer. But he’s shifted in front of Mitch before. And shifting is always better with another person there.

“If you don’t mind the shedding,” he says, and strips off like he would in the locker room.

He’s always been a fast shifter. Mitch watches him openly—he’s seen it before, but Dylan gets that it’s kind of fascinating to see someone’s body parts move around and grow fur as their bones change shape. Then it’s done, and Dylan feels that sense of ease he always gets when he claims his second skin.

There’s a person here. A person who smells like friend and will let Dylan bound up and sniff his neck. Mitch laughs as Dylan lands on him—he’s always been ticklish—and Dylan collapses next to him and lets himself get cuddled for a couple of hours.

There are a couple of good reasons to do this besides the comfort of it, actually. It’ll help him get over the jet lag—being the wolf is always energizing, like it’s giving his human body a break. And he needs to feel connected to Mitch, and fast, because he’s about to take to the ice with a new team, and their first game is against the U.S.

It’s always the weird thing about international tournaments: seeing your normal teammates in the wrong colors, on the wrong side of the ice. Dylan’s done it before, but maybe never with someone he’s as used to playing on a line with as Alex, because it’s worse than usual this time. Every time Dylan ends up on the ice opposite him he catches himself fumbling.

He keeps it together, and eventually scores. But it’s one of only two goals for Canada, and they lose the game.

They go out afterward anyway—it’s only the prelims, they still have plenty of time to win, and enough of the Canada boys have friends on the other side that it makes sense to go drink together.

Dylan feels like maybe he shouldn’t spend the whole evening hanging out with Alex, since, you know, team bonding, and maybe it would be weird, but after a few drinks that seems dumb so he goes and finds him. Alex is talking to Werenski and Tkachuk and Matthews, and Dylan wedges himself into their circle, Alex making room for him immediately. It’s still kind of tight in the bar, though, so they end up shoved together, which is nice.

“You guys toasting your one and only victory of the tournament?” Dylan asks the Americans, and they all laugh at him.

“Wish we could say that about your loss,” Werenski says, “but, well…”

“Hey, we beat them. That means this guy has to give me first pick at NHL17 for the next month,” Alex says.

“You say that like it’ll actually help you win,” Dylan says, and Alex laughs some more. His cheeks are pink. Dylan’s not sure why he’s even noticing that, but they are, like they’d be warm to the touch.

“Don’t you have a Burberry shirt you should be wearing?” he asks.

“Dick. I let you into my closet in confidence,” Dylan says.

“Did you? Tell us more about the inside of Dylan’s closet,” Tkachuk says to Alex, who elbows him hard enough that his drink sloshes over. Tkachuk doesn’t seem to care too much, cracking up.

“You guys played well,” Matthews says to Dylan, looking a little more sober than the rest of them.

“Thanks,” Dylan says, or intends to, before he breathes in and loses the ability to speak.

Matthews…is a wolf.

Dylan had no idea. He knows about all the other wolves in the CHL—but Matthews is playing for Switzerland, he remembers. Dylan maybe wouldn’t have heard. And Matthews’ scent is super faint, barely detectable, and weird in some way that Dylan doesn’t really understand. But he’s definitely a wolf. An alpha.

It’s getting hard for Dylan to breathe. He’s never sure what to do around other alphas. Like, it’s not like he thinks they’re going to attack him, but he knows there are things he should be doing, and—

He’s shaking. He wishes he hadn’t had so much to drink. He dimly registers that everyone’s looking at him funny, and Werenski says, “Hey, are you—”

“Um, yeah, gotta go,” Dylan says, and he’s out of there, making his way toward the exit.

There’s a hallway outside. The bar is, like, inside a mall or something, but most of the other stores are closed, and the air smells thin out here after the thick human scents of the bar. Dylan goes like two storefronts down and sinks down to sit against a blank stretch of wall, under the bright fluorescent lighting.

There’s nothing to be ashamed of in not liking to be around other alphas. Lots of alphas don’t. It makes them want to fight, to assert their dominance. He just kind of needs to sit here until his heart rate goes back down.

He sits there for a while, knees up to his chest, and then Alex comes out. Dylan tenses up, not sure how to explain what just happened, but Alex just sits down next to him and says, “Man, I am super drunk.”

Dylan laughs. “Are you? You don’t seem that drunk.”

“’Mgood at that,” Alex says. “Used to always. Parents.”

Dylan leans in. He does smell drunk: there’s the strong berry scent of that weird liqueur everyone’s been drinking, laid over Alex’s natural mix of nutty-and-green. He wonders what it would taste like if he licked Alex’s neck. He wonders if Alex would let him, if he would laugh or giggle or lean into it, if it would make his skin hotter and his scent better.

Dylan doesn’t do it. Obviously. He’s not _that_ drunk. “Gotta drink here while you can,” he says. “Put that eighteenth birthday to good use.”

They celebrated Alex’s eighteenth birthday a week before they left. Dylan gave him a bottle of Scotch—the good stuff, the stuff where Dylan actually likes all the different scents that make it up. Alex has a fake ID anyway, they all do, but eighteen is a birthday that deserves good alcohol. “Oh yeah,” Alex says, face lighting up with a smile. “We gonna drink that soon?”

He is drunk. Dylan can see it in the flush on his face: pink on his cheeks, over the bridge of his nose. Maybe they can drink the Scotch, and it will make Alex’s skin taste all smoky, and Dylan can lick him to find out. “Yeah. Whichever of us wins. We’ll do a toast.”

***

Neither of them wins. Canada washes out in sixth place. The U.S. does better, gets bronze, and Dylan avoid the Americans on the flight back. No one really wants bronze, but sixth is like…sixth is like they weren’t even one of the good teams. Not even in contention. They might as well have been Belarus or something.

The media is obsessed with the loss. They always frame it in the context of not playing in the NHL this year: isn’t Dylan disappointed in how the team has done, after he was so lucky to get to play in World Juniors for another year?

Yeah, Dylan feels real lucky. Can’t even bring Canada to a respectable finish at the competition that’s supposed to be the easy level.

No one asks what it’s like to play another alpha on the American team, which means they don’t know. Dylan doesn’t tell anyone, not even Marns.

Alex is on Dylan’s transfer from New York after they land in LaGuardia. Dylan’s still feeling kind of bitter, but he sits with him anyway; it would be weird not to. They’re both kind of quiet at first—tired: it feels like three in the morning to them. But after takeoff, Alex leans back in his seat and huffs out a breath and says, “Well, that tournament sucked.”

Dylan’s startled into a laugh. “Not so much for your team.”

Alex gives him a _really?_ look. And—yeah, okay, maybe the U.S. didn’t do as embarrassingly badly, but Alex got injured in the second game and scored once in the whole tournament. At least Dylan got to net a few.

“Guess we’ll just have to tear it up with the Otters instead,” Dylan says, and that gets him a real smile.

“Better watch your back in that points race,” Alex says.

“I don’t need to—you’ll be back there watching it for me,” Dylan says, and Alex groans and shoves him away, then leans back in, and they both catch a few minutes’ rest as the plane banks down into Erie.

***

They don’t toast anything with the Scotch. But they do play well that spring. He and Alex tear it up, clicking back into place after World Juniors like they were never apart. Dylan hopes Arizona is watching.

He gets to go home in late January for a belated Christmas celebration. It’s the only time he and Ryan and Matt are all free to travel. They end up overlapping at home for like ten hours total, but still. They play a couple of hours of pond hockey and have a huge faux-Christmas lunch before collapsing in front of _Elf._

Dylan shifts into his wolf form half an hour into the movie. His brothers are used to it; Dylan shifted for the first time when he was a toddler, and Matt learned to stand by pulling himself up on Dylan’s fur. They smell boring and familiar and Dylan flops between them and feels like he belongs somewhere. It’s harder to concentrate on the movie like that, but it’s not like he hasn’t seen it before.

His mom shifts, too, before he leaves, and they run around the backyard together. It’s always a little weird being around his mom when she’s shifted: she’s his mom, but he’s an alpha, and she’s the one who taught him what that means. He’s never really been sure when he should step up and take that role.

She noses him on the neck and bites down a little, so he guesses it’s not yet. He lowers his head and lets her shake him by the ruff before they run again.

It’s not really enough. It makes him kind of antsy when he gets back—even antsier than he felt after World Juniors, when he got to shift with Mitch. That’s what he gets for not wolfing out with anyone all fall, he guesses. He spends a couple of days feeling like he’s displaced in his own body, like it’s the full moon even though it’s not for a couple of weeks.

He maybe compensates by bumping into Alex a bit. Or a lot. When they’re standing next to each other, or walking by each other, or whatever. Dylan has the feeling he’s being kind of annoying, even though Alex doesn’t say anything—or, rather, he says stuff, but he doesn’t sound annoyed about it. “Did you need something?” he asks in the bathroom, smirking, when he’s flossing and Dylan wanders in and bumps against his back on his way past.

“I don’t know, you looked like no one had body-checked you in a while,” Dylan says, going to the cabinet over the toilet and looking around for something he doesn’t need.

“Yeah, no, it’s true, I was feeling deprived,” Alex says.

The next morning when they’re going past each other in the hallway Alex checks him into the wall. It’s a way harder check than Dylan gave Alex in the bathroom—more like an actual check than a nudge—and Dylan hits the wall and sputters. He sees Alex grinning as he walks past like nothing even happened.

Dylan’s smiling as he goes to his room to get dressed.

***

It’s so good, having touch returned, like taking off a tight band around his chest he hadn’t realized was there. Not that Alex never touched him before—but it was usually Dylan initiating it, and now Alex is doing it, too.

They’re on the bus back through upstate New York, and Dylan has been zoning out listening to music when he notices that Alex has stopped doing whatever boring-looking homework assignment he was working on. Dylan turns his head, thinking he might suggest a card game—he’s getting pretty tired of his music—but Alex has his head back against the headrest and is breathing choppily through his mouth, his face kind of strained.

His scent is off, too. There’s a sour note edging into it. “Are you okay?” Dylan asks.

“Yeah, just.” Alex takes a breath. “Carsick.”

“Oh shit.” Dylan remembers that, from when he had to keep looking at a textbook or whatever even when the bus was jolting along because not doing his homework meant a failing grade and the threat of getting scratched for a game. It was the worst. “You need to, uh…?”

“No, I think I’m gonna be okay,” Alex says. His words are clipped. Probably trying to avoid throwing up in the bus bathroom and having everyone chirp him about it forever.

“There’s, like, a thing,” Dylan says. “Do you mind if I…”

Alex lets him take his wrist. Dylan hasn’t done this in years; his mom used to do it when he and his brothers got sick on long car trips. He measures three finger widths down from Alex’s palm and presses his thumb on the spot between the tendons.

Alex relaxes almost immediately. Dylan can see it in his shoulders. It takes a few minutes longer for his breathing to even out, and by then his scent is better. “That’s awesome,” Alex murmurs when Dylan lets up on his wrist a little to let the blood flow again. “What did you even do?”

“You just measure three fingers down,” Dylan says. “Here, you try.”

He expects Alex to try it on his own wrist. But Dylan’s wrist is there, too, in the mix, and that’s the one Alex takes, laying three fingers against it to measure and then wrapping his hand around it and pressing down.

Dylan shouldn’t feel that much. He’s not even carsick. But Alex’s hand is around his wrist, solid pressure gripping tight, and tension Dylan didn’t even know he had is running out of his shoulders like water. He feels like something’s swelling inside his stomach, like a balloon is being blown up. His eyes flutter shut before he forces them open again.

“Did I get it?” Alex asks. He’s not even looking at Dylan’s face, and Dylan still feels too exposed.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, blinking and looking away. “That’s—good.”

It takes a few beats for Alex’s hand to loosen its grip and break contact. Dylan’s not sure what happens after that. His head is fuzzy for the rest of the trip.

***

He doesn’t really think about it. Not what it means, anyway. He does think about the grip, a little: wraps his own hand around his wrist that night while he’s falling asleep, lets it soothe him like warm water lapping against his chest.

The full moon is in a few days. Maybe that’s why he’s feeling weird shit like this. He sprawls out on the couch with his head on Alex’s thigh, and it doesn’t feel like enough.

“Hey,” he says, while Alex’s Dragon Age character is running up a hill. “You’re cool with the wolf thing, right?”

“No,” Alex says. “I secretly hate you.”

“Asshole,” Dylan says lazily, and turns to bite Alex’s leg before thinking better of it. That’s maybe a little too wolf. Though, given what he’s going to ask—“How would you feel if I was a wolf sometimes?”

“Like, different from how you’re a wolf all the time?” Alex asks.

“No, I mean—”

“No, no, I get it,” Alex says. “Yeah. That’s cool. Knock yourself out.”

Dylan lies there for another moment. It sounded like Alex meant it. But it doesn’t seem possible that it could just be okay so quickly. He feels like he should explain more, make sure Alex has really thought it through. But Alex already said it was fine; what else does Dylan expect him to say?

“Um, okay. Let me just—” he says, getting off the couch. He doesn’t absolutely have to be naked to shift, but he’s pretty sure the awkwardness of squirming out of his boxers in his wolf skin would be worse than the awkwardness of just stripping first. They do see each other naked all the time, after all.

Alex does do a double take when Dylan starts taking off his pants. “Yeah, I guess I don’t see wolves wearing clothes a lot.”

“Not if we can help it,” Dylan says. He feels super dumb standing there in just his underwear. It’s true that he’s naked around Alex all the time, but it’s usually not in the Ackermans’ family room while Alex is fully clothed. He shucks his underwear off and transforms as fast as he can, before it can be too weird to be standing there with his dick out.

The wolf shape comes quickly, like his body is happy to go back to it. It brings with it an end to the feeling of awkwardness—because he’s not naked anymore in any way that matters, but also because awkwardness isn’t a wolf feeling. And there’s so much else to focus on. This family room is so full of new smells that aren’t in Dylan’s bedroom: all the people who’ve come through, their feet on the ground and their bodies on the furniture, the faint traces of food wafting in from the kitchen. And Alex—fuck, Alex smells _great._

Dylan’s over there sniffing him before he can think about it consciously. He has his paws up on Alex’s shoulders, and Alex is laughing as Dylan buries his snout in Alex’s neck to get his scent. “Hey—what—” Alex says, still laughing, getting hold of Dylan’s head and stroking the fur, pulling Dylan back a little to see his wolf face.

Vision isn’t as important to the wolf senses. Dylan can see that Alex’s face is bright and happy, but it’s his scent that matters more: Dylan can smell it so much more clearly now, that rich nuttiness with a sharper note like fresh cedar. Dylan’s human enough even in this form to know better than to lick Alex’s face, but he wants to. Alex smells so much like home. Smells like _his._

He doesn’t lick Alex’s face, but he does give in to a different type of temptation and dart forward—human hands aren’t really strong enough to hold him—and nose at Alex’s ear. Alex gives a surprised yelp. “You asshole,” he says, and wrestles Dylan onto the couch.

It’s a good thing the Ackermans have a big couch. Dylan only falls off once, and he leaps back on and gives Alex a face full of fur before they’re wrestling again.

They’re pretty evenly matched, like they wouldn’t be if Dylan were in his normal body. Alex maybe even has the advantage: Dylan’s wolf only weighs about ninety-five pounds, and Alex has fifty or sixty on that easily. He couldn’t take Dylan in a teeth-out fight, but wrestling like this, with Dylan’s jaws closed, Alex’s larger weight and massive thighs come in handy. Dylan has to fight to keep from being crushed to the couch.

After a while he doesn’t want to, though, and they slow down and settle in with Alex on his side and Dylan snuggled against his front. Maybe not a word Dylan would use out loud, but it’s definitely snuggling: Alex’s hand is buried in the thick fur of his neck, and his warmth is all along Dylan’s body, and Dylan doesn’t want to move ever. 

His mom had a talk with him when he left home for the OHL. It’ll be tough not having a pack, she said. Wolves don’t need other wolves, necessarily—but they do need other people around them, people who are theirs. Like Dylan and his father and brothers were to her, she said. If Dylan was serious about a career in the NHL, he’d probably have to go without that for a while, and that was going to be tough for him.

Dylan was serious about a career in the NHL. Still is. But sometimes he loses track of how much he’s missing out on, until suddenly he gets it again and he remembers what it feels like to be whole.

Alex is good at this. Mitch has always been terrible at it: he’s forever wanting to bounce up and do something, run around, play a game, and Dylan likes all those things but sometimes he also wants to lie still and just feel someone else next to him. Connor was better at it, letting Dylan snuggle up to him when he was sleeping and stuff. But Alex is even better. He’s breathing slowly and peacefully, and his hand is gripping Dylan’s fur, and Dylan feels like he _has_ him. Like nothing will ever shift Alex away.

It’s not really true at all. Not even in the short term: Dylan knows they’re both going to have to get up and do other things—go get ready for bed, if nothing else. But it doesn’t _feel_ like it. Dylan soaks in that certainty, that feeling that this isn’t going anywhere, lets it spread from his nose to the tip of his tail until he feels completely, one hundred percent safe.

***

“So Wednesday is the full moon,” Alex says the next Monday.

“Yeah,” Dylan says. They don’t have a game this time; their next game isn’t until Friday. Dylan will be able to drive himself to the field and drive himself back the next morning; much easier than calling a Lyft at six a.m.

“So, I don’t know, if you ever wanted some company,” Alex says.

Dylan wasn’t expecting the question. Connor never ran with him—but then, Connor never asked. It maybe doesn’t have to be that big a deal. And it’s way better to run with someone else.

“Yeah,” he says, and Alex’s face brightens into a smile.

“Cool.”

Dylan reminds Alex maybe a few too many times to dress warmly. It’s not Canada, but Pennsylvania in February is no joke. “And maybe bring some snacks,” he says on Wednesday when they’re getting ready to go. Alex isn’t going to have, like, wolf moon energy to get him through things.

“Okay, but like, I don’t know, should I dress warmly, or…” Alex says, and laughs when Dylan throws him the finger. So he’s maybe a little nervous about the whole thing. So sue him.

Alex drives them to the field with the woods where Dylan usually transforms, which is good because Dylan’s way jitterier than usual. He tries to remind himself that this is just a normal moon run. The moon is pulling on him, and he’ll answer it and transform, and Alex will be there. They’ll run. No big deal.

“You have to strip outside in fucking February? That sucks,” Alex says when they’re in the woods and Dylan is pulling off his coat and sweater.

“Yeah, it blows, but at least it doesn’t last—augh,” Dylan says as he toes his shoes off and puts his socked feet on the ground. He was going to take the socks off, too, but not tonight. He can wrestle the socks off in wolf form.

“Okay,” Alex says when Dylan is biting at his socks to get them off his back paws. “that is legitimately the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Is it uncool if I take a video? Oh, hey, no! Aaah!” he yelps as Dylan comes after his phone with teeth bared, and then he’s running away, laughing as Dylan chases him and Dylan wasn’t sure what he was worried about.

They run for a while. Dylan lets Alex stay ahead for a little bit, and then he pounces on him, the two of them rolling over on the grass-stubbled ground. “No fair, you’ve got twice as many legs,” Alex says, and before he can pin him Dylan springs away and starts running, turning his head back to make sure Alex is following.

They switch to hide and seek after a while, hiding behind trees and rocks and making the other person find them. Dylan doesn’t actually have any trouble finding Alex—his scent is bright as a flare in the darkness of the woods—but he does do his best to sneak up on Alex in his hiding spot without Alex knowing he’s coming.

He makes Alex shout a few times. “One of these times I’m going to sneak up on you like that,” Alex says, smelling bright and cold and happy, and Dylan just scoffs and lets his tongue flop out in disbelief.

Alex gets tired after a couple of hours. He doesn’t say anything, but his steps are lagging, and Dylan can smell the fatigue in his scent. He goes over and nuzzles at his gloved hand.

Alex stops and drops to his knees to pet him behind the ears. “You can really keep going, huh?” he says.

In response, Dylan takes delicate hold of the edge of Alex’s coat in his teeth and tugs. It’s hard, communicating in wolf form: usually you don’t need to, or not in any way that would be recognizable to humans as communicating. But Dylan has a human here with him and his human is tired.

Alex lets himself be pulled toward the car. “Mm, yeah, okay, not a terrible idea,” he says. “I can take a nap and get back out and join you.”

Dylan makes a sound that’s as skeptical as he can manage with his wolf throat.

“I’m not going to just leave you halfway through the night,” Alex says, and that’s—Dylan has to rub his neck against Alex’s ankles. Sometimes some people just need to be scented.

“Okay, you are seriously fucking adorable,” Alex says. “Are you going to rip my throat out if I say that?”

Dylan chuffs and head-butts him in the direction of the backseat. “Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” Alex says, and then, “Hey, whoa,” as Dylan jumps in after him.

Dylan doesn’t usually sleep in the middle of a full moon night. The moon gives him enough energy to make it through. But he doesn’t always stay out all night, either, and if Alex is going to sleep, he’s not just gonna stay out and run. Full moon nights are about pack.

Alex seems to catch on, and he lets Dylan arrange them across the backseat so that they’re snuggled together for sleep. “Yeah, okay,” Alex murmurs sleepily. “Warmer this way, anyway.”

Dylan doesn’t mean to have his nose end up in the crook of Alex’s neck. It’s maybe a little intimate for sleeping with someone who isn’t even an official packmate. But Alex isn’t gonna care, and Dylan’s nose ends up there without his trying, and the chilled sweat is sharp in his nose, and he lets himself drift off, content.

***

“Motherfucker,” Alex groans when they wake up with the light of dawn. Dylan’s still in wolf form—good thing, because otherwise he’d be naked, and he’d probably have frozen to death. Or died of embarrassment. “This backseat was not meant for sleeping in.”

Dylan licks his shoulder in sympathy. Dylan isn’t going to have the soreness problem. But then, Alex doesn’t have to go into the trees on a freezing February morning and get naked again.

It’s a little awkward when Dylan does shift back. At first he’s just jumping around trying desperately to get his clothes back on before something important freezes off, and Alex is trying to help, but then they’re in the car and the mood is kind of groggy and Dylan isn’t sure what to say. Did Alex like it? Is it weird to ask that?

“Next time,” Alex says, like the start of a sentence, and Dylan’s stomach gives a jerk.

“Yeah?” he says, voice scraping a little.

“Next time, we gotta get to a bed for the sleeping part,” Alex says, and Dylan’s stomach bubbles over hotly.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we can do that.”

***

The team washes out in the second round of the Robertson Cup playoffs. It’s a bummer: Dylan wanted to end his Otters career on a higher note. He feels weirdly detached when he’s saying goodbye to the guys after locker clean-out, fighting off incipient panic at the idea of not playing with them again. “Like we’d let you forget about us,” Taylor says, smacking him on the arm. But it still feels worse than last year. Last year Dylan knew there was a good chance he’d be coming back.

His flight leaves a bunch of hours before Alex’s, so they’re planning to say goodbye at the house. They end up cuddling on the couch maybe a little more thoroughly than they would normally—usually they only cuddle that intensely when Dylan’s a wolf. Less of a chance of weirdness that way. Now, though, they’re not going to see each other for months, who even knows when, so fuck weirdness: they end up wrapped around each other for two whole episodes of _Empire,_ and if Alex isn’t going to say anything about it, Dylan sure as fuck isn’t.

He’s going to take a cab to the airport, but Alex offers to drive him, so then they’re in the car together, and Dylan feels tongue-tied. He never feels like that around Alex, and he hates it. This should be good, their last drive together, but Dylan keeps thinking about how maybe it really is the last one and it makes words dry up in his mouth.

Alex drops him off at the terminal. “So, I’ll see you, I guess,” Alex says, and it sounds like a question, and Dylan hates it.

“See you on TV,” he reminds him. “For the draft.”

Alex screws up his face. “Maybe,” he says, his scent coloring with the anxiety that’s been there lately every time someone mentions the draft, the anxiety he probably doesn’t want Dylan to know about.

Dylan wants to be able to scrub his scent clean. There is no reason for Alex to be nervous about the draft. He’s the best person Dylan’s ever played with bar Connor McDavid, and Connor was drafted fucking first overall. Alex had 101 points in 60 games this season, 51 goals; he should go top ten, easy. Probably top five—Dylan did.

But he hasn’t been up there on any of the lists. Dylan doesn’t get it at all. But he’s been reading the draft commentary a little obsessively, maybe, and Alex keeps not being mentioned, or being weirdly discounted. So—so maybe Alex is right to be nervous.

Still, though—there’s no way Alex isn’t in the first round. “I’ll see you,” Dylan says confidently, and Alex is huffing a laugh, and then Dylan gets one last hug.

He maybe sneaks his nose into Alex’s neck a little bit. Just a little. It’s going to be a long time before he gets to have that scent near him again.

So Dylan goes home, and he hangs out with Matt and Ryan and Connor and Mitch and Mikey and everyone else who’s still in the Toronto area, and he texts Alex a bunch, and also some of the other Erie guys, and he trains, and he doesn’t really worry about the draft. There’s no way Alex doesn’t go high.

 _does the city suck as much as i think it does?_ he texts Alex when he knows Alex’s flight has landed in Buffalo

 _funny, it asked the same thing about you,_ Alex texts back, and Dylan sends back the emoji with its tongue sticking out.

They don’t text that much after that because Alex is busy with the pre-draft stuff. Dylan remembers that craziness. He doesn’t want to get in the way of it. He definitely watches on TV, though—he always does, when he’s not there in person. He and his whole family are in the living room, watching as the Leafs select Auston Matthews, predictably, and the Jets select Patrik Laine, and so on down the line of teams.

Dylan is kind of secretly hoping Alex will go sixteenth, to the Coyotes. It’s around the right spot in the lineup—like, Alex really should be going higher than that, but the way people are underestimating him, sixteenth seems about right. But the Yotes GM picks Jakob Chychrun, which—okay, he’s pretty good, and they do need better D. Dylan can accept that, even if he’s kind of disappointed. People don’t really ever get drafted to the same team as their friends.

He starts getting nervous around pick twenty. He gets that people are being dumb about Alex, but Dennis Cholowski? Who the fuck is this guy, and why would anyone think he’s a better pick than Alex?

“Looks like your boy is getting snubbed,” Ryan says, and Dylan kicks him in the ankle. Alex is not going to be snubbed.

Except he is. They get to the last pick in the round, the Ducks, and they go with Sam Steel. “What the fuck?” Dylan says.

He doesn’t quite mean to say it out loud. It’s just so…it doesn’t make any sense. Alex is at least as good as Dylan is, and Dylan went top three.

“Wow, that sucks,” Matt says. “I mean, he’s small, but didn’t he have like a hundred points?”

“A hundred and one,” Dylan says blankly. He’s still staring at the TV in disbelief.

“He did have a pretty bad World Juniors, I guess,” Ryan says, and Dylan is whirling furiously to face him before he manages to pull back.

This is a thing, a wolf thing he’s had to learn to deal with: sometimes his instincts get triggered, and he has to know how to rein them in so that he doesn’t end up making an idiot out of himself and maybe hurting some people. Dylan’s never had that much of a problem with anger, even on the ice—doesn’t fight more often than his teammates or anything. But this time he needs a moment of deep breathing before he can think through the rage.

His mom notices, and ruffles his hair on her way out of his room: helping him calm down further, praising him for pulling himself back. But Dylan still feels like he’s holding on by a thread.

He takes his phone to his bedroom and opens the calling app before thinking better of it. Everyone’s going to be reaching out to Alex right now. Dylan doesn’t want to pile on when he’s probably dealing with all kinds of shit already. He texts him, though: _call me if you get free?_

Alex calls him a couple of hours later. “Hey,” he says, sounding tired.

“That was some prime bullshit, eh?” Dylan says, which—he wasn’t planning to sound quite this angry, but it really was bullshit. The primest.

Alex sounds worn out. “Yeah. I mean, I knew that might happen.”

“But, what the fuck?” Dylan says. “Why would you even think that would happen? You fucking killed it this year. They must be out of their minds. You got over a hundred points—”

“And I’m five-seven,” Alex says.

“Well—sure, but,” Dylan says. He knew that—obviously; he has eight inches on Alex, it’s not like he didn’t know—but it was just so far from his mind. Alex is so _good;_ he’s a dominant force on the ice. Thinking of him as small is just dumb. “That doesn’t fucking matter.”

“Well, they’re assholes,” Alex says, so matter-of-fact about it that Dylan’s startled into a laugh.

“Such assholes,” Dylan says. “Fucking screwing you over.”

“I mean,” Alex says, hesitant. “Does it really matter if I get drafted in the second round? I mean, I know chances are worse, but I’ll still get, you know, prospect camp, and.”

And maybe they won’t be such assholes when they’re actually looking at what Alex can do on the ice. “Yeah,” Dylan says. “Yeah, no. It doesn’t really matter where you’re drafted, as long as you get a chance.”

“Exactly,” Alex says, sounding relieved.

Dylan wishes he were there. He wishes he were there so fucking badly. He’s such shit at being comforting in words. He wants to pull Alex close and make sure he knows what he’s worth, and maybe that’s a weird wolf thing but he wants it, okay?

“Wish I were there,” he says, the most he’s willing to reveal of all that.

“Dude, you fucking don’t want to be,” Alex says with a laugh. “It’s such a shitshow here. _I_ don’t even want to be here.”

 _Wish you were here, then,_ Dylan says, but knows better than to say. He can curb his own weirdness, sometimes.


	2. Chapter 2

Alex does get drafted: ninth in the second round, to the Chicago Blackhawks.

It’s insultingly low. But draft order doesn’t matter that much, Dylan reminds himself, and Alex sounds like his normal self when Dylan talks to him later. “Original six,” Alex says tauntingly.

“Just wait till this expansion team kicks your asses,” Dylan says.

“You’ll probably have to wait a year,” Alex says.

For a second Dylan thinks Alex is chirping him, that he means—but no: he’s talking about himself. “What? Did they say that?”

“No, but I figure,” Alex says. “Most people stay down their first year, right?”

Right. That’s what Dylan’s been telling himself all year. There’s no shame in staying down your first year.

“I think it’s gonna be okay, though,” Alex says. “Stan Bowman was talking to me—how they didn’t even have a first-round pick this year, and he didn’t really say it, but I think he was trying to tell me that they would have taken me anyway? In the first round, I mean. Like, probably not, but they did take Patrick Kane. At least they’re not gonna hold the height thing against me.”

He sounds kind of embarrassed to be saying all this about himself, but Dylan’s glad. Alex doesn’t say enough good stuff about himself. “You’re gonna be better than him,” Dylan says, fiercely sure all of a sudden.

Alex laughs again. “Hey, man, I’d settle for being two-thirds as good. Or like half.”

Dylan doesn’t argue with him. But he’s pretty sure he’s right.

*** 

The rest of the summer is divided into before and after prospect camp. Dylan works out a lot, hangs out with Connor and Mitch, lounges around the house with Ryan and Matt. They play ball hockey in the street and trash-talk each other’s NHL teams—pretty ineffectively, in the case of Mitch’s, since they’re all Leafs boys born and bred. But Dylan figures he has to get good at trash-talking. He’s gonna be on the Coyotes; it’s the only thing he might be able to win at.

Prospect camp goes pretty well, as far as Dylan can tell. He managed to bulk up a lot in the early part of the summer, and it makes it harder to knock him off the puck. It’s still tough to adjust to a new group of players, though, and then there are the nerves, and the tougher pool: prospects for the NHL are obviously going to be a step up from high schoolers who are still trying to get there.

His stomach is doing a ridiculous dance when he gets called into John Chayka’s office at the end of camp. Chayka’s new; he isn’t the GM who thought Dylan was worth drafting third overall. He seems like a nice enough guy, but that doesn’t mean anything in terms of what he wants from Dylan.

Dylan sits in the chair opposite of his desk, with Coach Tippett’s eyes on him, and tries not to squirm.

“So, Dylan, your second development camp,” Chayka says. His scent is calm; Dylan can’t read it at all. “How are you feeling?”

Dylan hates it when they ask that. He’s feeling sick with nerves, thank you very much, and he doesn’t want to assess his own performance. But he hasn’t been through years of media training for nothing. “I feel like I’m getting a lot of great opportunities here,” he says. “This feels like a place where I could really grow.”

It’s not a lie. He’s spent maybe two weeks altogether in Arizona; he isn’t even used to how the desert smells yet. He doesn’t really know how good he can be here yet.

“I’m happy to hear that,” Chayka says. “We think you offer good potential to the team, and we’d like to sign you to an entry-level contract.”

Dylan can barely see the print on the page through his relief. He gets through the rest of the meeting and goes outside to call basically everyone he knows.

He calls his parents first, obviously. Then, without thinking, he calls Alex—dumb, maybe, since Alex hasn’t even been to camp yet and what if he doesn’t get an offer? But Dylan can’t imagine not telling him right away.

“Guess what I’m holding right now,” he says when Alex answers.

“Uh…Chychrun’s head while he throws up in the toilet,” Alex says.

Dylan’s startled into a laugh. “No, what? It’s one p.m.!”

“I just figured you were all so depressed about being on the worst team in the NHL that you were day-drinking to make up for it,” Alex says.

“Dick,” Dylan says, sticking out his tongue even though Alex isn’t there. “No. It’s an ELC with my name on it.”

He shouldn’t have worried about Alex’s reaction. There’s nothing in Alex’s voice but happiness. “Dude! That’s amazing.”

“Seems like you’ll have to struggle through without me in Erie this year,” Dylan chirps.

It’s not as guaranteed as all that, in either direction. Arizona doesn’t have to play him just because he signed an ELC. And Chicago might play Alex. But Alex doesn’t call him on it. “We’ll have to trip ourselves on the way to the face-off circle,” Alex says. “Rough.”

“Hey, that was one time, and I caught you,” Dylan says while Alex laughs at him.

It’s so weird to think that he won’t have Alex on the ice with him next year. It keeps hitting Dylan in different ways over the course of the summer. He watches the coverage pretty closely the next week when Alex is at Blackhawks camp. Alex still isn’t getting as much media attention as Dylan feels like he deserves, but the mentions there are of him sound pleasantly surprised—which, yeah, that’ll teach everyone to pass over him thirty-eight times—and Alex’s texts about it sound optimistic.

Dylan wonders who Alex’s new linemates will be, and the thought of it is like missing his footing when he’s going onto the ice.

He looks up the media coverage of Toronto’s camp, too. There’s a lot of it, both because it’s Toronto and because of Auston Matthews. Marns is getting a bunch of attention too, which is nice, but it’s Matthews’ coverage that Dylan’s curious about. It’s the same as it was last year: not a single mention anywhere of him being a wolf. Which must mean they don’t know, because Dylan can count on one hand the interviews he’s had where they didn’t ask him anything wolf-related. 

Dylan’s a little jealous, to be honest. Not that he wants to be closeted—that’s no fun for anyone. But it would be easier if the media weren’t looking to him as the future of wolves in the NHL. It’s not even accurate, since now Auston is the highest drafted wolf in recent history.

He tries not to be jealous of _that._ There are only so many directions he can be jealous in at once.

***

Dylan goes to Coyotes training camp at the end of September. He’s not more nervous than last year, he’d say. But it’s a different flavor of nerves. This is his second year; this is the year he has to make it.

He’s spent the last couple of months working out. He’s in the best shape he’s ever been in. He’s feeling really good about things—until they start scrimmaging.

He’s not, like, a total disaster on the ice. He can do the skills stuff just about as well as he did at prospect camp. But training camp is different: it’s about the team, about who clicks with who on the ice. And Dylan can feel himself not clicking. Not like he did with the Otters—not even like he did last year at training camp, which, it doesn’t make sense that he would’ve gotten _worse_ since then.

It throws him off. It makes him feel like his body isn’t quite its normal dimensions, or like maybe he’s forgotten how to work his limbs. It makes panic flutter in his throat.

It’s still early, though. It’ll get better. He was drafted third overall—and he tries to shove down the sound of his own voice, telling Alex that draft order doesn’t matter.

Things do get better, a little. But they don’t get _great,_ and Dylan wants them to be great.

Connor calls him on the evening of the second day. “Hey, how’s camp?” Connor asks.

Dylan knows the answer Connor’s looking for. Things have been—not strained, exactly, between them, but Connor was pretty quiet about his life in Edmonton all summer, and Dylan knows he didn’t want to rub it in Dylan’s and Mitch’s faces that he’d made it already and they hadn’t. He’s waiting for Dylan to click over into the slot he’s supposed to be in so that things can be normal again.

“Uh, great,” Dylan says. “You know, yeah, pretty good.”

“That’s awesome,” Connor says, sounding genuinely happy.

Dylan feels bad about keeping up the lie, so he hangs up pretty soon after that and then lies there staring at the hotel ceiling. He really hates hotels: no matter how well they clean, there are always other people’s scents all over everything. It’s even worse when he’s in a hotel room alone. It makes him feel groundless, like he’s not even in his own skin.

He shouldn’t have lied to Connor, maybe. But he couldn’t have told him, either.

He goes to his phone again and thumbs through his texts. The chain with Alex is pretty near the top, and Dylan clicks into it. _you a blackhawk yet?_ he texts.

Alex calls him in response. “Hi,” Dylan says, relieved even though he hadn’t known that was what he wanted.

“Man, I think my legs are going to fall off,” Alex says. “No one should ever skate that much in one day.”

“That would be pretty bad,” Dylan says. “You’re short enough as you are.”

“Like being a giant is any better,” Alex says. “How’s camp?”

Dylan opens his mouth to say something, something pleasant, and it doesn’t come out. He already lied to Connor. And Alex won’t—maybe this is why he wanted to talk to Alex, because maybe Alex won’t feel bad for him in the same way. Maybe it’ll be okay. “I can’t skate for shit here,” he says.

As soon as he says it he feels everything well up: hot pressure behind his eyeballs. He presses his lips together and breathes deep while Alex says, “What? No way, that’s crazy. You’re—you can always skate.”

Dylan lets out a choked laugh. “Not right now. I can’t—I mean, I can skate, I’m just not good. I can’t do anything with these guys.”

“So maybe it’ll take more time,” Alex says. “It’s been, what, two days?”

“Do you feel like you can’t skate with the Blackhawks?” Dylan asks.

Alex hesitates. “It’s not the same,” he says. “I mean, it’s tough, definitely, these guys are way better than me. But I think…like, maybe you get more attached to teams than I do.”

It feels like a blow to his gut. Not that Alex should be so attached to the Otters that he can’t skate with the Hawks, just—“Yeah, maybe that’s, yeah.”

“Not that I don’t get attached,” Alex says. “I just mean—you said you had a hard time at World Juniors because of the new teammates, right?”

“Yeah, at first,” Dylan says.

“So it’s probably like that,” Alex says. “You just have to give it time.”

“Right.” Dylan’s starting to calm down a little. Alex didn’t mean—it’s fine.

“So, you want the dirt on the Hawks?” Alex asks, and Dylan does, so Alex tells him stories from his training camp while Dylan lets the familiarity of his voice wash over his body.

It’s not as good as having Alex there with him. Dylan can’t smell him, touch him like this. It’s not as good as if they were on the couch back in their billet—but that’s not somewhere Dylan’s ever going to be again. And this is good, too, Alex’s voice coming through the phone, with him wherever he goes.

***

The rest of camp does go better. Not amazingly, maybe. But Dylan feels a little less like he’s stumbling over his own feet, and he gets added to the roster for the away team for the preseason.

“Me, too,” Alex says when they talk after camp. Dylan’s stretched out on his bed in his hotel room again; he was going to take a nap, but the hotel room felt too empty and foreign, even though he’s been there for days by now. “They’re sending me to Pittsburgh next Friday.”

“Sweet,” Dylan says, trying not to sound chill about this whole preseason thing and not at all like he wants to throw up.

His first game goes really surprisingly well, though. They play the Kings on Monday, and Dylan gets the game-winning goal. No points in the next two games—but still, a game-winner, that’s an awesome start.

Alex calls him after the third game, when Dylan’s back in the hotel. “I’m being sent down,” he says.

“What?” Dylan sits up. He looked up the box score, and he knows no one from Chicago scored; but still, it’s only one game. “Already?”

“They want me to have some more development,” Alex says. “Like you said, pretty normal for the first year.”

Dylan did said that. He’s said it to himself, and to other people; he’s said it so many times he should really believe it by now. But there’s still this part of him that thinks: if you’re good enough to matter, if you’re one of the special ones, you go to the NHL as soon as you’re eligible. And Alex should be one of the special ones. Even if Dylan isn’t.

He can’t really say that, though. “Yeah, no, that’s true,” he says. “You’ll be up there next year.”

“The two of us, rocking the NHL,” Alex says, and Dylan wants, again, to be there with him, so badly. He feels like if they were there together, it would be easier to believe in almost anything.

***

Dylan gets two assists in the next game and nothing in the final game. Three points in five games: not stellar. Points aren’t everything, but they’re a good shorthand, and Dylan’s stomach starts trying to eat its own lining as soon as Chayka calls his phone.

Chayka tells him he’s sticking around. “For a while, anyway. We’d like to see more of what you can do,” he says.

It’s not what Dylan was hoping for at this point. Marns is in Toronto, tearing it up already, and Dylan has to be better than him. He has to justify Arizona picking him instead.

“Are you sure they’re—okay with you, there?” his mom asks when he calls his parents to tell them it’s still undecided.

The hesitation in her voice makes it clear what she’s asking about. Dylan almost wishes—well, no, he doesn’t actually wish he could pin it on discrimination. He doesn’t want to have to deal with that. But he wishes there were something he could pin it on other than his own sucky play. “Yeah, no, they’ve been really good about it. I think they’re just—not sure what they need, yet.”

That’s not quite right. They pretty much know what they need. It’s just not clear, to either them or Dylan, that he can give it to them.

He’s never felt like this before—never, on any team he’s played for. Not even World Juniors. The Yotes are trying him in a bunch of different combinations, and he keeps hoping something will click, but it doesn’t.

Maybe because the other players aren’t the problem.

He isn’t on the roster for the opener, but he’s tapped for the road trip that starts with the second game. It’s a long one: six cities in ten days. He hopes that means they want to play him for all of those.

His NHL debut is in Ottawa, and he gets an assist in the second period. His first NHL point. It’s not the most brilliant play or debut that’s ever happened. It’s certainly not Auston Matthews’ four goals in one game. But Dylan’s so relieved it’s almost fun to do the post-game. He played in his first NHL game, and he got a point. He doesn’t even mind when they ask him how it felt to be left out of the season opener last week.

“Do you feel like being a wolf is making the transition more challenging?” one reporter asks.

He doesn’t know why they bother asking questions like this when his answers are never interesting. “Transitions are always hard, getting to know a new team, a new style of playing,” he says. “I’m just grateful to the team for giving me a chance on the ice.”

It’s a variation on one of the standard answers he’s given over the years. But he thinks about the question later that night, while Chychrun snores on the other side of the hotel room. He doesn’t think being a wolf has anything to do with his poor play. But the thing where he sits alone in a hotel room in Phoenix, where he hunches in on himself amid strange bodies he doesn’t have the right to touch yet—yeah, he thinks maybe the wolf thing isn’t making it any easier.

But it’s not a big thing. Lots of guys have personal stuff that make it annoying to be on the road or away from their families or whatever. It’s fine.

He plays against Montreal a couple of days later, and then the team heads down to New York for their game against the Isles. Dylan’s been both looking forward to this and dreading it: the last thing he wants to do is get scratched when he’s supposed to be playing against his brother.

He ends up on the roster, though, and he doesn’t totally embarrass himself, even if he doesn’t get any points. Ryan takes him out for food after. “My baby brother, in the NHL,” Ryan says.

Dylan squirms at the words. “I mean, not for real yet.”

“Hey, you played in the game, didn’t you? They’ll commit to you,” Ryan says, like he knows it for sure, and Dylan shuts up and eats his burger.

When he rejoins the team for practice the next morning, one of the coaches pull him aside. “We’re concerned about your skating skills,” he says, as Dylan’s stomach shrinks into a tight little ball of dread. “We think they might be holding you back on the ice.”

“Okay,” Dylan says. He knows he hasn’t been skating as well as he should be. His body doesn’t seem to want to do what he tells it to. “I mean, I can do some extra training—”

“We’re going to send you back to Phoenix to work with some of the people we have back there,” the coach says.

“Send me back—now?” Dylan says. They still have three cities left on their road trip.

“You’re booked on a flight this afternoon,” the coach says.

It’s not a charter plane like they use to fly to games. Dylan waits through normal airport security and sits at his gate with thousands of strangers milling around him. He pulls out his phone.

Alex picks up on the second ring. “Coyotes too boring for you?”

“They’re sending me back,” Dylan says.

“What?” Alex’s voice is bright, charged up. “That’s—wow. When do you—”

“Oh,” Dylan says, and he feels a new wave of—guilt, longing, whatever. “No. Not back to Erie. To Phoenix, for the rest of the road trip. They say I need to work on my skating.”

“Oh,” Alex says, the energy draining out of his voice. “Wow. That really sucks.”

“Just because you want me to be in Erie, right?” Dylan jokes.

“Yeah, you caught me,” Alex says. “I sabotaged your skating.”

“Knew it. You guys can’t live without me,” Dylan says.

“Yup,” Alex says. “I was putting on my shoes this morning, and I thought, wow, this foyer just isn’t the same without Dylan’s sneakers stinking the place up.”

He’s working hard for the joke. Dylan can hear it in his voice. “See, I knew I was good for something,” Dylan says, but he’s pulling his feet up onto the neighboring seat so that he can hug his knees to his chest. There’s no excuse for it—he just saw his parents in Ottawa, and he spent the night with Ryan—but he just wants it so badly, suddenly: the feeling of walking through the Ackermans’ front door. Those scents he knows, Alex waiting on the couch.

He can’t want to go back, though. Being here isn’t the punishment. It’s the reward. If goes back, he’s that guy who was okay in Juniors but couldn’t crack the big leagues.

“I’ll see if I can mail you a sneaker from Phoenix,” he says. It’s a joke, and Alex snarks back, but what Dylan is really thinking is: he should have kept something of Alex’s. Something from the Ackermans’, something that smelled like the both of them, something to make him feel like he’s at home.

No. He can’t let that still be home for him. What he has to do is make a new home in Arizona, one that feels just as good as Erie did. One he’ll stay in for a long time.

***

They give him skating drills to do, and Dylan works as hard as he can. He always has. This is the first time he’s felt like maybe he won’t succeed, though.

He doesn’t know what to do with this feeling. He’s been one of the best players on every team he’s been on. He was drafted second overall to the OHL. Third overall by the NHL. In 2015 he was the OHL scoring leader, just ahead of Marns, and he assumed that would continue—that he wouldn’t be the best player on the Coyotes, maybe, with all the seasoned veterans around, but that he’d be _good_. He’s never not been good. He doesn’t know what happened to his skill.

He just has to work harder.

The team comes back after three more games on the road. Dylan’s hoping to be added to the lineup when they play Colorado at home, but he gets the call that they don’t need him: Dvorak is playing well; they want him to stay up instead.

“Of course,” Dylan says, swallowing down everything else he’s feeling. “Whatever’s best for the team.”

He tries to chat with the guys when he goes in for practice, but he’s pretty sure it feels awkward all around. He hasn’t made any really good friends here—Domi and Duke are cool, and Chychrun’s good to room with, but he doesn’t know any of them well enough to joke with them about his own failure. Doesn’t know them well enough to be sure they’re not looking at him pityingly when his back is turned.

Probably they’re not. But his shoulders stay up the whole time he’s in the room anyway.

He sits out for the game against the Avs. Then they play the Sharks, and he gets the call that they want him again.

He tries not to be too excited about that. It’s pretty pathetic, being excited about just being able to play in a game when Connor and Mitch are playing in a game almost every other night. He also tries not to be too nervous. It’s pretty clear that he has to do something spectacular in this game if he wants to stay up.

He doesn’t. He gets a single shot on goal. He somehow gets to stay up for their game against Nashville anyway, and he travels with the team to Anaheim, where he not only doesn’t get any shots on goal, he goes minus-two for the game.

One shot on goal in three games. Dylan can’t even tell himself not to panic about that.

He gets out of the locker room quickly. He knows it’s a bad idea to avoid his teammates—it’s important to feel connected to your team even if you’re not a wolf, and it’s doubly important for him—but right now it just feels too hard to be around them.

He’s not looking where he’s going as he leaves, and he takes a wrong turn and ends up lost in the Honda Center. It’s super dumb, he doesn’t even know what happened, but he’s totally turned around and has no idea how to get back to the entrance.

He smells the wolf before he sees him.

It’s another alpha. Dylan stops, frozen. He wants to turn tail and run—doesn’t want to have to deal with this—but the other alpha has definitely smelled him, too, and that means he’s not supposed to back down.

He stays where he is, and Ryan Kesler comes around the corner. 

Kesler’s grinning. “Oh, hey, baby coyote,” he says. “Or should I say, baby wolf?”

Dylan smelled him during the game, of course. But they were hardly ever on the ice at the same time, so it wasn’t too hard to deal with. Now they’re alone together in an empty hallway, and Kesler’s team just defeated Dylan’s, and Kesler is coming towards him.

It’s so stupid to be afraid. But Kesler gets close enough that Dylan’s heart is thundering in his ears. Then: “Welcome to the NHL,” he says, slapping Dylan on the back. “Anyone add you to the group text yet?”

“Huh?” Dylan says.

“Here, let me get your number,” Kesler says, pulling out his phone.

Dylan has a new group in his WhatsApp by the time Kesler directs him out to his team’s bus. Claws and Pucks, it’s called, and Kesler’s texted a selfie of him and Dylan with a caption, _look whos here!!!!_

His phone floods with responses for the next few hours: other guys introducing themselves, saying hi. It’s nice of them; Dylan tries to appreciate it. But he just keeps thinking—they’ve all made it already. Some of these guys have _really_ made it, like, ten million a year made it. What makes them think Dylan belongs enough to be welcomed?

He’s surprised when he doesn’t get a call from the coaching staff the next day. He hasn’t played well enough to deserve to stay on the roster. But he flies with the team to Colorado, and no one says anything, and he’s hoping he gets another chance. It’s not until the team gets to the rink for the game that he finds out he’s been scratched.

It’s fine. It’s happened before. Dylan nods respectfully at the guy who’s telling him and says the right things. “Do you have any suggestions for my play?” he asks.

The coach says a few things: work on his edges, his puck handling, his speed. Then: “I know you’ve always benefited from good linemates,” he says. “Time to make some things happen on your own, okay?”

It’s the voice he’s been hearing in his head, when he’s trying to fall asleep at night. _You weren’t that good; it was Connor; it was Alex. You’re nothing when you’re on your own. We were tricked into taking you. We want our third pick back._

Dylan nods, lips pressed together, muscles clenching up tight.

He keeps finding himself wrapping one arm around his chest in the press box, gripping his opposite bicep. He knows that means he’s getting to a bad place—that he needs to find someone who’ll touch him, who’ll put an arm around him, who’ll give him a hug. But what has he done to deserve a hug from any of these people?

He keeps it together in the press box. Then he goes back to the hotel room he’s sharing with Jakob. Jakob gets in the shower right away, and Dylan sits on his bed with his knees drawn up and his phone in his hand, brushing his thumb back and forth over the home button.

He wants to call. But if he gets Alex on the line, he won’t be able to keep it together anymore. Dylan isn’t sure what happens if he starts to fall apart. He can’t let that happen. And he doesn’t want to tell Alex what the coach said—doesn’t want Alex to know the truth about him.

He doesn’t call.

***

They don’t play him against Winnipeg.

They don’t play him against Boston.

They don’t play him against Calgary.

“They should just send you down,” Ryan says over the phone. “What are they wasting your time making you sit around for?”

Dylan can’t say anything in response. Keeping it together is harder every day. If he gives at all, he’ll crack.

He still wants to prove himself. But now he’s afraid that even if they give him another chance, he won’t be able to—that no matter how many chances they give him, he’ll never be able to produce anything good.

They put him on the roster for the game in Vancouver. He feels sick beforehand, to the point where he goes into a bathroom stall and breathes deeply a few times, waiting to see if he’s going to throw up. It’s not really a stomach thing, though: the sick feeling is crawling all over his skin.

They lose to Vancouver in overtime. Dylan gets two shots on goal. Neither of them goes in.

He’s not even surprised when Chayka calls him a few days later, back in Arizona. Dylan didn’t even play against San Jose the night before. At this point he’s just numb. “We’ve booked you on a flight this afternoon to Erie,” Chayka says.

“Yes, sir,” he says, and then maybe some shit about how it’s been an honor. He doesn’t even know anymore.

It’s a long flight to Erie. He has a two-hour layover in Philadelphia, where he texts Alex to let him know he’ll be coming and then puts his phone back on airplane so he’s not tempted to look at any of the texts or voicemails that have come in. It must have been announced already.

He falls asleep on the flight to Erie even though it’s less than an hour. When they land, he’s disoriented and groggy, and it takes him a minute to realize he’s smelling Alex in reality and not just in some delirious corner of his imagination.

Alex is there. In person. He’s standing by the baggage claim, leaning against a pillar with one of Dylan’s gear bags in front of him.

Dylan doesn’t even think. He walks right up to him and puts his arms around him and holds on tight.

It’s not a bro hug. It’s not the chillest thing Dylan’s ever done by a long stretch, and he doesn’t even care. He’s exhausted and worn thin and can feel cracks spiraling through him and he just got sent down from the NHL and Alex is _here_.

Alex hugs him back. Thank fuck, or it would be really awkward really fast. Alex feels so solid. Dylan feels so brittle, like he might break in two, and for a moment he just lets Alex hold him up.

He smells so good. How the fuck does he smell so good? Dylan thought he remembered how Alex smelled but he doesn’t remember it being _this fucking good_.

Dylan’s breathing really hard, partly because of the smell and partly because it feels like he hasn’t breathed properly in at least two months, and Alex just kind of lets him. Doesn’t call him on it. They hold onto each other until Dylan’s breath evens out and he feels like he can stand on his own.

“Uh, hi,” he says, pulling back. He feels kind of awkward about it now, now that he’s partially recovered.

“Hi.” Alex is grinning. “I thought you might want this bag.”

“You know just what to get a guy,” Dylan says, pulling out of the hug and nudging his bag with his toe. He still has two more of them circling the carousel.

They don’t talk about it much on the way to the car. Alex tells him the story of the prank the rookies tried to pull last week—Dylan could have told them that you don’t balance the bucket of water over a door you yourself are about to go through—and Dylan feels some of the muscles in his neck start to unknot.

“Oh,” he says abruptly when they’re driving. “Shit. I didn’t call—do the Ackermans know I’m coming? Do they even—”

“The team got in touch with them,” Alex says. “They told me you were coming before you even texted.” He grins. “Honestly I was kind of hurt.”

“Okay. Good,” Dylan says. “I mean—you know.” He was in such a hurry to get out of Arizona, he didn’t even think through what he was going to do when he got here. It didn’t even occur to him before that the Ackermans might _not_ want to take him back this year. Just the thought of having to go to a new family—

“Ha, yeah, I get it,” Alex says. “And, um—I know this isn’t, like, what you wanted to happen or anything. But, uh. We’ll all be really happy to have you back.”

“Thanks,” Dylan says, and manages not to add, _me too, me too._ This isn’t where he’s supposed to be happy to be. But he keeps looking over at Alex and thinking, _he’s here,_ and he doesn’t know how to turn that part of him off.

The Ackermans both hug him hello—much shorter hugs than the one with Alex—and Mr. Ackerman jokes about the weirdness of only having one hockey-player appetite in the house for a while there. Then they give him space while he calls his parents.

Dylan should have called them earlier. He’s not sure he could have, though: traveling was about all he had the energy for. He couldn’t have handled the work of sharing his news with people who already knew it and letting them have feelings about it.

His mom is a little teary, but not because she’s upset. “I’m so glad for you,” she says. “You were so happy in Erie last season.”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, and doesn’t tell her how much she’s not helping. How he already feels so much better about being here than he did about being in Arizona, and what does it mean for him, if that’s true? This isn’t a place he can have a future.

But the house smells like a gift he’d forgotten he’d asked for. Someone else slept in the bed over the summer—the older son, who Dylan’s met a couple of times—but his scent was in the room before, so it’s not even unfamiliar. Every minute in this house is adding pieces back onto Dylan’s body that he didn’t know were missing.

And yet he can’t sleep.

He and Alex don’t stay up that late—they’re on the couch in the family room, a game playing in the background (not Arizona) but really just talking, Dylan soaking up the feeling of having him near again. He doesn’t want to go to bed. But his eyes keep closing against his will, and finally Alex nudges him and tells him they’d better go if they want to be awake for practice tomorrow.

But Dylan gets in bed and can’t fall asleep.

He wasn’t sleeping all that well in Phoenix. But that was a hotel; of course he wasn’t sleeping well. This is a house he knows and which smells more and more familiar with every breath. There’s no excuse for the itch under his breastbone that won’t go away as the clock ticks from eleven to midnight to one.

Finally he gets up and strips and puts his bathrobe on. He knows this isn’t something he should do. It’s not something he ever _has_ done, except for on full-moon nights, and the rules are different then. This could blow up in his face—but he’s so tired. He just wants to sleep. And it’s his first night back: that can be his excuse, if this doesn’t go well.

He leaves his room and goes down the hall. He knocks lightly at Alex’s door; when there’s no answer, he eases the door open and shuts it behind him.

It’s dark in the room, only the faint light from the street coming through the blinds. Dylan drops the bathrobe and shifts and pads over to the bed.

Alex jerks sleepily when Dylan noses at his shoulder. “Wha—oh,” he says, blinking with half-open eyes at Dylan’s wolf form. Then: “Yeah, ’kay, come here.”

He lifts the blankets, and apparently it’s just that easy. Dylan jumps onto the bed.

Alex’s bed is soft and warm and smells more like him than anywhere Dylan’s ever been. They usually do this in Dylan’s bed when it’s a full-moon night—if Dylan’s muddy paws are going to be in someone’s bed, he figures it should be his own. Being surrounded by Alex’s scent like this is so much. Dylan feels himself relaxing before he even lies down properly. Then he does, and Alex puts an arm around him and presses sleepily against his side, and Dylan feels it like a rush of warmth that pours through him and washes away the past two months. Dylan can barely hold onto consciousness, but he wants to, just because it feels so amazing, watching it all disappear.

Not two months, he thinks before exhaustion and the heat of Alex’s body pull him under. Six. That’s how many months it’s been without this. That’s how much time he’s making up for.

***

It’s surprisingly not awkward in the morning. Alex wakes up with his alarm and yawns and says, “Go change, we have practice in an hour,” and Dylan’s trotting out of the room before he can think about it.

It’s too early to be awake, but Dylan feels rested like he hasn’t in weeks. Everything about him feels better, and that’s before he even gets on the ice.

Dylan’s nervous about it. He still feels wrong-footed, like maybe everyone’s thinking about how he failed with the Coyotes. But as soon as he steps onto the ice with the rest of the team he forgets about all that.

It’s the opposite of when he took to the ice with the Coyotes in September. Dylan keeps being surprised by his body, but in good ways: his body _does_ know what to do to get the puck where it needs to be, to be in position to receive it from the other players. All his hockey instincts are somehow back.

He doesn’t know why it is. He knows this team, sure, but that can’t be everything—he can’t only play good hockey when he’s with a team he knows. If that’s the case, he’ll never be able to stick around an NHL team long enough to _get_ this comfortable.

But that doesn’t add up. He was fine when he first came to Erie. Maybe it’s just the relief of being back, or having less stress on him, or—or maybe he can handle the O, but the NHL is too tough for him. 

He pushes down that last thought. He just needs to work hard here, improve his skating skills, and he’ll be able to bring these skills to the NHL next year. He’s aging out of Juniors—it has to be next year.

The first week is kind of weird in general, brittleness and rejection clinging to him. But everyone’s happy to see him. And he’s spending most of his time with Alex; it’s hard to feel brittle around Alex. Neither of them has to go to school anymore, so they work out most mornings and then either hang out with the other guys who are out of school or go home to chill on the couch

It’s so different from his life in Arizona. Dylan didn’t realize how much time he was spending alone until he started being surrounded by people all day. He didn’t realize how disconnected he felt from his teammates on the Coyotes until he stepped back into these circles where he fits so seamlessly.

He doesn’t sleep in Alex’s bed after that first night. Alex seemed chill about it and all, but Dylan doesn’t want to press his luck. He’ll save it for full moons.

It’s a couple of weeks after Dylan comes back to Erie that Alex says, “Let’s get drunk tonight.”

“Sure,” Dylan says. It’s a Sunday, and they don’t have an early-morning practice the next day. They do have one after the school day ends, but they can probably be okay by then if they don’t go too overboard. “You want to go out, or…”

“Nah, let’s finish the Scotch,” Alex says.

There’s still a good chunk of the bottle left from Alex’s birthday present last year. “Didn’t feel right to drink it without you,” Alex says, and Dylan’s kind of absurdly touched by that.

The Ackermans are home, and neither Dylan nor Alex is drinking age in the U.S., so they go into Alex’s room. Dylan might slightly engineer that—he likes being surrounded by Alex’s scent. It helps him relax more easily.

“To teams that didn’t know how good they had it,” Alex says, raising the first glass.

“To two months without you assholes,” Dylan says, but they both know he doesn’t mean it.

It’s not the kind of whiskey you do shots with; they drink slow enough to taste it, but fast enough that they’ll be feeling it soon. Dylan savors the flavors on his tongue, and the quiet of the room, and the easiness of lying here next to Alex and talking about random stuff without having to think about his words.

It takes until their second glass for Dylan to realize Alex smells like anxiety. That hasn’t happened since the draft—or maybe it has and Dylan wasn’t around for it, but Alex isn’t a very nervous person. He doesn’t even get anxious before games, just charged up. And this is stronger than it ever was about the draft shit.

It knocks Dylan right out of his comfortable ease and wakes up a part of him he thought was gone: the part of him that spent the past two months waiting for the next person who was going to tap him on the shoulder and tell him he wasn’t good enough. Is Alex going to talk to him about the thing where Dylan climbed into bed with him two weeks ago? It seems like he would have said something sooner, but maybe he wanted to wait for a time when they weren’t completely sober. Or maybe Alex wants to tell him that he’s not playing well enough in Erie either—Dylan has six points already, but maybe it’s not—or maybe Alex wishes Dylan hadn’t come back. Maybe he’s gonna say—

“Hey, so,” Alex says when they’re on their third glass. “Sorry if this is weird, but, uh, I wanted to tell you.”

“I’m sorry,” Dylan blurts out.

“What?” Alex says.

“Whatever you were going to say. I’m just, I’m sorry. I, uh—”

“Dude, what?” Alex is grinning at him, leaning against the wall at the head of his bed with a half-full glass of whiskey in his hand. He looks so good when he smiles. Dylan really doesn’t want him to be pissed off at him. “What makes you think you did anything?”

“Oh. I don’t know.” Dylan just—lost it for a minute there. His head is spinning a little. Maybe he’s drunker than he thought. “Sorry, I. Uh. What were you going to say?”

Alex swirls the Scotch in his glass. “Well. I was actually going to tell you that I’m gay.”

“Oh,” Dylan says. “ _Oh._ Wow. Uh. What?”

Alex laughs a little, uncomfortably. “Uh, yeah, I—sorry if that’s weird. It’s kind of a secret. I just—I wanted to tell you.”

“No, that’s.” Dylan’s never thought about it before. “That’s cool.” Now he’s thinking back on the times he’s been at parties and shit with Alex. “Wait, but all those times you hooked up?”

“I didn’t really,” Alex says. “Or, I did, but probably not the times you thought I did.”

“Oh. Like, with guys?”

Alex laughs, a little more normal-sounding this time. “Yeah, dingus. Like with guys.”

“Huh.” Dylan can feel the whiskey traveling down to his stomach, hot along the way. Definitely drunker than he thought he was. “Okay, but, wow. That’s gotta, like. That’s gotta suck for you.”

“Well, the hooking up with guys part doesn’t,” Alex says, grinning, and Dylan feels his face get hot. He didn’t mean—“But yeah, it sucks not being out yet. I figure, you know. After I’m in the NHL. Once I’m valuable enough.”

Dylan remembers this feeling from during the draft: wanting to be there to make sure Alex knew how much he was worth. Only now he is here, and he can show him.

It occurs to him, as he moves up the bed, that maybe this is a weird thing to do with someone who just told you he’s gay. But they do this all the time. Dylan isn’t going to stop touching him just because Alex told him he’s gay. He was gay all last year, too, and it was fine.

He moves up the bed and lean against the wall next to Alex, pressing their shoulders together. “Thanks for telling me,” he says. “If anyone gives you a hard time, I’ll beat them up for you.”

This time Alex’s laugh is surprised and happy. It’s a nice sound. His scent has shifted toward something mellower, more like normal, filtered through the smokiness of the whiskey. “I’ll definitely let you know,” he says, nudging Dylan’s shoulder with his own.

Dylan leans over so his head is resting on top of Alex’s, and Alex tips his head into the space between Dylan’s head and shoulder, and Dylan feels warm and comfortable from the contact like he always does. They’re gonna be okay.

***

He doesn’t think much about Alex’s confession that night or the next morning. They drink some more of the whiskey and lie around talking sleepily until way later than they should, and then they go to bed and wake up cranky around noon. Dylan scrambles them some eggs, doesn’t even burn them, and they swallow some Tylenol and nurse their headaches so that they’re feeling more or less human by the time practice rolls around.

Later, though. When they’re at the rink and changing, Dylan catches sight of Alex naked—for like the hundred thousandth time in their lives—and thinks, _Does he look at guys in the locker room?_

That’s probably not a question he should ask, even sometime when there aren’t a ton of other people around. But then he finds himself wondering if there are any guys on the team that Alex wants to look at, and what kinds of guys he thinks are hot, and Dylan’s going to need some reinforcements if he doesn’t want to make an idiot of himself here.

He takes a walk after practice and pulls out his phone. He thinks about calling Connor but realizes after about half a second of thought that Connor would be utterly useless at this, and he calls Mitch instead. “Hey,” he says. “Do you know any gay people?”

“What?” Mitch yelps. “Why?”

“No…big reason,” Dylan says slowly. That was some surprising volume, there. “Just, this guy came out to me, and I want to make sure I don’t mess it up.”

“Oh.” Mitch sounds calmer. “Okay, well, um, I guess, just, don’t insult him or anything?”

“No fucking kidding,” Dylan says. “I mean, like, are there things I should do? Or not do? It’s got to suck, I don’t want to, like, make it worse.”

“Does it?” Mitch says. “Like, have to suck.”

“Um, I guess it doesn’t have to? But it’s hockey. It can’t be super great.”

“There are all those players who are out now, though,” Mitch says. “Kane and Toews, and Seguin and Benn, and—oh, hey. Are all wolves gay?”

“What? No, we are _not,_ ” Dylan says. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Okay, geez, I was just wondering,” Mitch says. “You have to admit it’s kind of a pattern.”

Dylan does see how maybe it’s a little unlikely. “There are plenty of other wolves in the league,” he says. _Like your teammate, for one,_ he doesn’t add. “I should’ve known better than to ask you about this.” Not that Connor would have been any better. Dylan needs new best friends. 

“Hey, I am extremely helpful,” Mitch says. “For example, I’m gonna suggest that maybe you ask him this shit.”

“Maybe,” Dylan says. It kind of feels like it would defeat the purpose. “Unless you mean I should ask him about gay wolves in the NHL, which, no.”

“Just saying, could be something there,” Mitch says, and Dylan makes annoyed noises at him. But actually that’s given him an idea.

He’s tried to stay out of the wolf WhatsApp since he got sent down. It’s not very active very often, except when Tyler Seguin decides to challenge people to cute-baby-picture competitions. But mostly Dylan feels like he doesn’t deserve to be on it. He’s not in the NHL.

But this is a thing where he could actually use their help. It’s not a wolf question, but Mitch is right: a lot of them _are_ gay. They might know stuff.

_sorry to bother u guys,_ he types. _but i was wondering if u had any advice. this friend of mine just came out to me as gay and i dont want to say the wrong thing._

He gets responses right away. _TELL HIM HES SUPER LUCKY,_ Tyler Seguin sends, with a bunch of star emojis and then some eggplants.

The rest of them are more helpful.

_don’t ask him stupid questions,_ Jordan Eberle says. _he def knows that he’s changing in locker rooms with a bunch of naked guys. you don’t need to make him anymore selfconcious about that._

_think about what u wanted when you were coming out as a wolf,_ Patrick Kane says. _obvi not the same, but could help._ Which would be more helpful if Dylan had really had a coming out as a wolf, but still.

_He might be someone who needs words more than actions, or vice versa,_ Sidney Crosby says. (Sorry: that was Sidney Fucking Crosby. How is Dylan even on this chat?) _If he’s not a wolf, he might need to hear from you directly that you’re okay with this._

_make sure he knows your still his friend,_ Jamie Benn sends.

_BANG HIM,_ Seguin sends, and Ryan Kesler sends a crying-laughing emoji.

Dylan stares at his phone at the messages from some of the greatest hockey players of the past decade. That’s…not at all intimidating.

_thanks guys,_ he types. _thats super helpful._ Except for Seguin, but he figures it’s better not to add that.

It’s good advice, but it’s not super easy to know what to _do_ with it. Dylan is supposed to make sure Alex knows he’s still his friend, and maybe supposed to use words instead of actions? But not ask any stupid questions.

He wonders which questions are the stupid ones.

“Um,” he says to Alex the next morning when they’re getting ready to go for a run. He doesn’t really want to say anything, but then he keeps thinking about what if things get messed up between them, and that’s way worse than the idea of bringing this up. “You know I’m, um. Still your friend. Right?”

Alex gives him an incredulous look. “Yeah, I was pretty sure of that.”

“Okay, I just.” Dylan scrubs the back of his neck with his hand. He doesn’t feel like he has too much limb very often, certainly not on the ice, but he feels like it now. “With the gay thing. I wanted to make sure you knew. I didn’t want to, like, mess shit up.”

Alex is laughing at him. In a nice way, though. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’re doing a great job.”

It could have been intended as sarcastic, but Dylan is actually really happy to hear it.

***

He sticks to the thing about not asking dumb questions. He keeps thinking them, though. They have a house party after they play Niagara, at Maxy’s billet because his billet family doesn’t care, and Dylan wants to ask so many times leading up to it what Alex _did_ at all those parties last year and the year before when it seemed like he was going off to hook up. There’s always a mad scramble to get girls to come to the parties, the guys in high school mining all their connections to try to even out the gender ratio; Dylan supposes there are non-team guys who come too, friends and friends of friends, and he’s just never noticed, because why would he? If he wants to hang out with guys at parties, he has the team. But maybe some of those guys are the people Alex has hooked up with.

_Don’t ask stupid questions,_ he repeats to himself as they drive from the rink to the party, him and Alex in a car with Cerny and Feller. Maybe he doesn’t know where the border line of stupid questions lies, but he’s pretty sure this would be on the wrong side of it.

It makes him self-conscious when they go into the party, which is already crowded and loud. How much time does he usually spend with Alex at a party? Is it weird if he drifts away now—or maybe he should drift away, because otherwise he’ll be watching to see what Alex does like a total creeper?

“You want a beer?” Alex shouts over the music, and Dylan nods and is happy to have a reason to follow Alex to the kitchen and not have to decide anything yet.

They start talking to a group of people in the kitchen, Podds and Sammy and some of their friends. Dylan ends up talking to this girl, pretty, with a turned up nose and freckles, who’s cousins with one of Sammy’s friends. “Yeah, I graduated last year,” she says, and Dylan’s relieved, because he’s never sure what to do with high school girls now that he’s a year and a half out of school. Especially not when they’re into him, like this girl is.

It’s easy to tell with her. Some people are hard to smell arousal on, but this girl has one of the more obvious scents. Plus she’s smiling at him and tilting her head back and baring her neck as they talk. She probably doesn’t know he’s a wolf, but that doesn’t stop the wolf in him from zeroing in on that.

They dance for a while, the girl digging her fingers into his hips, and end up in a corner of the upstairs, the girl—Kate—groping at his fly while Dylan thumbs at her nipples. He’s not the most into her he’s ever been into anyone, maybe, but he’s pretty sure he’s about to get a blowjob out of this, and he’s not complaining about it.

He wonders if Alex has ever done this with a guy. He can’t help but think of it while Kate gets his zipper open, his dick jumping under her hand. He wonders if Alex has ever gotten to do this at a party, sneak off into a corner with a guy, or if he didn’t want to because he might get caught.

It feels so weird to think of two guys being hot for each other like that. Especially when Kate’s hand is on his cock. He finds himself wondering whether it feels different to Alex to have a guy’s hand on his cock rather than a girl’s, and how different it is when it’s a mouth on your cock, which is where he’s pretty sure this is about to go next.

He thinks so, anyway. But then Kate’s hands are on his shoulders, and she’s whispering, “You first,” while pushing him down to his knees, and, oh, Dylan feels a flush of heat from the notch of his collarbone to the pit of his belly.

He’s never had a girl do that before. He likes eating girls out, has done it lots of times, but—he doesn’t know, something about doing it first when he thought he wasn’t going to, maybe, and her hands are tight on his shoulders and he can’t think about it anymore because his head is fuzzy with arousal and he can smell her through her jeans. He wrestles them open, and yes, she’s wet, and he’s always loved this part, but it’s even better this time.

Better if he could do it without thinking about Alex again. It pops into his head, though, the comparison, and it distracts him, knocking him out of the moment of licking between Kate’s folds. Alex has obviously never been on his knees sucking a pussy, but maybe he’s been on his knees sucking a guy off. Or maybe—maybe he’s been the one leaning against the wall, his hands an iron grip on some guy’s shoulders while he makes him—

Dylan wraps his own hand around his cock. He doesn’t usually jerk off while eating pussy, likes to let the other person make him come, but he can’t help it. His cock is aching too much to ignore it. He jacks himself and sighs with relief and licks at Kate’s clit. She’s leaning back against the wall, making these little moans in the back of her throat, and Dylan licks at her wetness and wonders how different it would be with a thick cock in his mouth. The smell would be different—and he flashes on a vague locker room scent, something familiar but hard to pinpoint, and it shouldn’t be hot at all but he groans against her pussy as a bolt of heat shoots through him and he comes in his hand.

He’s so startled that he stops licking while he comes, and for a moment after. Then she gets her hand around the back of his head. “Come on, so close,” she says, shoving him forward, and an aftershock shakes its way through Dylan’s groin and thighs and he sucks hard on her clit until she’s gasping and rolling her hips jerkily against his mouth.

She pulls him up afterward, and he has to push her hands away when she goes for his cock. “I already, uh,” he says, and the reality of it is just starting to sink in: the cold humiliation of getting off in his own hand while thinking of—no. While licking a pussy. That’s what he was doing. “You’re just really hot,” he says, aiming for kind-of-a-joke, and he must hit the tone well enough because she just laughs in this surprised way and lets him kiss her a little before they sneak into the bathroom to clean up.

So that was…weird. But, okay, Dylan’s a wolf. He’s always been into the smell and taste of his partners; she must have just been really his type. Maybe he should get her number—but no, they’ve already gone their separate ways, and he doesn’t even know her. It was just a hookup.

He’s still feeling that mix of weird and good from the orgasm when he finds Alex and Taylor and Darren a few minutes later. “Someone got some,” Darren says, holding his hand up for a high five, and Dylan does it while grinning sheepishly. Alex is next to him, and Dylan throws an arm over his shoulder, pulling him in for no reason, just because. He likes having Alex pressed against him. He might also kind of try to smell surreptitiously whether he’s been getting some, too. He doesn’t know what Alex’s arousal smells like, but there’s nothing unfamiliar in his scent.

Of course not. Dylan’s been gone for, like, twenty minutes. And he shouldn’t be smelling his teammates for that.

He manages not to bring it up that night, but the next day, they’re lying on the couch—Dylan hasn’t shifted yet, and he’s telling himself it’s because he’s interested in this episode of _Kimmy Schmidt,_ but maybe it’s also a little bit because he wants to ask this question.

“Hey,” he says. This might fall under Eberle’s stupid question ban, but there are a lot of questions Dylan _hasn’t_ asked, and he’s held out on this one for a long time. He can ask just the one. “Do you usually, like, hook up at house parties?”

Alex is quiet for a minute. “Define ‘usually.’”

So he does sometimes. Dylan wonders if they’ve been parties he’s been at. “I dunno. Is it safe for you to hook up there?”

Alex shrugs one shoulder. “Not really. I mean, not if I don’t want to come out yet.”

_Where do you hook up, then?_ Dylan wants to ask. The question is in his mouth. But he gave himself one dumb question, and he’s already asked it. “Yeah, makes sense,” he says, and then toes Alex in the thigh. “Wolf time?”

He doesn’t know why he asks. He doesn’t normally. He feels dumb as soon as he does it. But Alex just says, “Yeah, c’mere,” and Dylan shucks his clothes and shifts and goes to snuggle with him.

There’s nothing unusual in Alex’s scent this time, either. Dylan breathes deep, walnuts and cedar, and lets Alex stroke his fur until he falls asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Dylan gets the call about World Juniors on December 14.

He stares at the phone for a good two minutes after Mike Hastings hangs up. Dylan said all the right things, he’s pretty sure: honored, of course he’ll accept, looking forward to working with you. It’s kind of a blur. But he feels like leaden weights are pulling his stomach down to his ankles.

He doesn’t want to feel like this. He wants to feel like he deserves this. But he can’t set aside all the reasons he doesn’t.

“So, are the World Juniors people high, or what?” he says, aiming for a joke, as he walks into the family room.

Alex is messing around with his laptop on the couch. It takes a minute for him to look up. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, it’s not my favorite decision they’ve ever made.”

The words feel like being stabbed in the gut. It’s not really fair, since it’s what Dylan was just thinking, but—“Yeah?” he says, voice cracking a little.

“I mean, I can see why they did it,” Alex says. “But yeah, not gonna lie, I kind of wish they’d made a different call.”

It’s like hearing the inside of his head talking back to him. Dylan feels weirdly unsteady on his feet. He—he feels like his knees are going to give out. “You, uh,” he says, his voice a rasp. He can have this conversation. He totally can. “Who do you think they should’ve picked?”

Alex shoots him a look. “What are you talking about?”

Dylan’s missed something. Maybe because of the panic fluttering in his chest. “What are _you_ talking about?”

“The World Juniors team,” Alex says. “They just announced it for the U.S.”

Dylan is mixed up enough that it takes him a minute to connect the dots. When he does: “Wait, what?” he says, going around to sit on the couch and grabbing at Alex’s laptop. The U.S. World Juniors roster is on the screen, and it only takes one scan for Dylan to realize that the name he’s looking for isn’t there.

“What, are they on crack?” he says.

“You already asked that,” Alex says, quirking a smile at him.

“You were almost two points per game last year,” Dylan says. “Hell, you _are_ two points per game this year. You’re at more than one _goal_ per game. How the fuck could they think they don’t want you on this team?”

Alex shrugs. “Like I said,” he says, and now Dylan can hear that that sound in his voice is hurt, not judgment. “Not their best decision.”

“No fucking kidding,” Dylan says. He kind of wants to go find and beat up the U.S. junior team coaching staff. They should at least realize how dumb they’re being.

“So what were you talking about when you came in?” Alex asks, which, yeah, Dylan guesses it’s obvious that he wasn’t talking about Alex not making the team. In retrospect, it was dumb that he assumed Alex already knew about Dylan’s thing. It probably hasn’t even been announced yet.

“Oh, yeah,” Dylan says. He’s suddenly deeply uncomfortable. “They want to make me captain. Of the Canadian team.”

Alex’s face breaks out into a smile. “That’s great!”

He doesn’t seem to be lying. Or faking, or whatever. Dylan doesn’t know how that could be true, though. “How can they ask me to do that, when you’re—” _so much better than me,_ is what he wants to finish with. Like, they’re both playing really well this year. But Alex hasn’t washed out of the NHL two years in a row.

“They’re always gonna give me shit about my size,” Alex says. He sounds like he’s trying to play it off as no big deal, but he’s not quite succeeding. “It sucks, but, you know.”

There are so many times in Dylan’s life as a hockey player that he has to remind himself that most teenage guys don’t full-on hug their guy friends on a regular basis. This is one time he doesn’t even bother. He puts the laptop on the coffee table and pulls Alex in. “If I had to pick anyone I’d ever played with to play with again,” he says, “it would be you.”

Alex laughs, a little strangled, but maybe not because of how tightly Dylan’s squeezing him. “You’ve played with Connor McDavid.”

“I know what I said,” Dylan says.

They sit like that for a while, breathing quietly, Dylan inhaling Alex’s scent. It brightens while they sit there, which makes something warm and satisfied spread through Dylan’s chest.

He lets go as soon as Alex stirs a little. He doesn’t want to be weird about it. Besides, they don’t move all that far apart: they settle into one of their more normal TV-watching positions, heads nestled together.

Dylan wonders if this is weird for Alex. They haven’t really done this since Alex came out to him—or, they have, but with Dylan as a wolf.

It isn’t, like, a sex thing. It’s just comfort. But Alex isn’t a wolf, and maybe he thinks it should be a sex thing, or that Dylan shouldn’t be doing it if it isn’t. Maybe it makes him uncomfortable.

Dylan could shift into his wolf form. But they’re already settled in, and he doesn’t want to pull away. Plus, he feels like there’s something…differently comforting about being a human. He feels like turning into a wolf would be retreating somehow.

“What about you?” Alex says. “Are you not okay with it? You as captain seems, I don’t know. It makes sense. Like, of course they picked you.”

“Yeah, it’ll be fine,” Dylan says. He’s not really sure that’s true. But he’s not going to complain about it when Alex’s stupid country didn’t even want him.

***

World Juniors is weird, as captain.

Dylan’s been captain of things before. He was captain of the Otters for the whole year last year. But he _knew_ those guys. It’s weird stepping up here, where he knows maybe half of these guys, and suddenly he’s expected to lead this pack that doesn’t feel like his.

Maybe he shouldn’t be going to pack metaphors so quickly. But they’re forced on him: every interview he has in Toronto asks him about the wolf thing. “How do you think being an alpha will help you as captain?” “Do you think being an alpha will make a difference in your performance leading the team?”

Dylan exhausted his standard answers to this back in 2015 when he first became captain of the Otters. There have been plenty of alpha captains in the NHL: Sidney Crosby, Jamie Benn, Eric Staal. It’s nothing new. Fortunately, hockey media has never had very high standards for originality. “I’m happy to bring whatever skills I can to the captaincy for Canada,” he says. “I’m hoping we can lead the team to a comeback, get our title back from Finland this year at home.”

The wolf thing does make a difference on the team, though, just like it did in Arizona. He can feel an immediate difference when he’s on the ice with these guys as opposed to the Otters, and he’d like to think it’s the normal difficulty any player has adjusting to a new team, but he’s starting to think it might be more than that. It’s starting to feel a little familiar, as an experience.

But of course it’s not like Arizona, not really. There are some guys he doesn’t know on the team, but there’s also Taylor and Darren, and guys like Barzal who already feel like teammates from previous years. Plus his parents are here. It’s so different from Helsinki, where there were little differences in scent everywhere that told him he was in a foreign country. This is home, even if that raises the stakes, the need to reclaim gold for Canada in the year that Canada’s hosting.

And Dylan actually plays pretty well. He gets two goals in their first game, and he keeps racking up points—the whole team does, getting them to the quarterfinals just a game behind the U.S. By the time they’ve beaten the Czech Republic and Sweden to advance to the final, Dylan’s feeling like, yeah, maybe he can do this. He might not get to be in the NHL, but maybe he can win this for Canada.

They’re going to be playing the U.S. in the final game. It’s still weird seeing the U.S. players in the halls and remembering that Alex isn’t among them. It’s a jolt every time. Dylan didn’t even spend that much time with Alex at the tournament last year—which seems weird, in retrospect, that he wouldn’t have sought him out more—but he keeps looking around, expecting him to be here.

It’s probably a good thing he’s not here for the final game. Dylan’s too used to being on a line with him, and when the play gets intense, it’s hard to rely on his eyes instead of his nose and his instincts—too hard not to pass to the wrong person.

The gold-medal game starts out strong. They score two in the first period. The lead feels good during that first intermission: it’s always hard to tell how a game will go beforehand, but the team is locked in on this one, playing well, and for the first time it feels real to Dylan that they might win this. He lets himself hope.

It’s probably a mistake. By the end of the second, they’re tied, and Dylan still can’t get anything into the net. They score two in the first five minutes on the third, but the U.S. ties it up _again_ and they go to overtime and then the shootout.

Dylan’s tapped first. He can feel that particular energy buzzing in his limbs as he teases the puck a little and aims for the goal: the energy that says everything is on the line here. Parsons is in his line of sight and he’s going to make it, he’s going to—

Parsons catches the puck in his glove.

It’s a thing that happens. Great players miss. But Dylan feels like he shouldn’t miss, not when it’s clutch. He wants to rewind those five seconds. He wants another chance, wants it more and more as he sits on the bench powerless as Barz misses, and Jost, and Cirelli. And then Troy Terry lands one for the U.S. and Roy skates up to the goal, and—

That’s it.

The end of a losing game sometimes hits Dylan like a physical shock wave: shaking his ear drums, his teeth, his guts. Thudding against his chest and making his lungs collapse.

His knees hit the ice. He knows he needs to get up—needs to be the captain his team needs him to be, needs to be strong—but all he can feel is how close they were. How it all fell apart.

It’s so hard to stand up and go through the handshake line. So hard to talk to the media. “Yeah, it was a tough loss, but I’m proud of the team,” he says. “No, you’re right, silver is nothing to be ashamed of,” he agrees when his parents say it, when so many other people say it. At some point he starts wondering if he’s even saying words that make sense, because he’s said them so maybe times already.

By the time he gets on the plane to Erie he’s exhausted, worn thin like writing rubbed off a piece of paper. He sits on the plane and thinks, he shouldn’t make a big deal about this in front of Alex. Alex didn’t even get to go; Dylan shouldn’t be a baby about getting silver when last year Alex only got bronze. He needs to keep it together.

Mr. Ackerman is in the kitchen when Dylan gets back. “Tough loss,” he says. “But silver, hey?”

“Yeah,” Dylan says. “Yeah, I’m really proud of the team. Do you know where Alex is?”

Alex is in the TV room. He looks up with a smile when Dylan comes in, and Dylan sits down next to him on the couch. He’s going to keep it together. It would be weird to ask for, like, comfort when he was lucky enough to go. He doesn’t need comfort. He just—

“So, silver,” Alex says, and Dylan breathes out, this shaky gasp, and then Alex’s hands are on him, pulling him in, and Dylan crumples. He doesn’t mean to—he was going to be strong and, and—but Alex’s hands are on him and Dylan is making this noise that’s shuddering out of him like laughter but isn’t.

“It sucked,” he says. “It sucked so much.”

“Yeah.” Alex is curling with him, pulling him down so they’re both lying on the couch. “I know. It’s the worst.”

“We sucked. I sucked.”

“You fucking did not,” Alex says, and Dylan knows that’s sort of true—he didn’t absolutely suck, not like he sucked playing with—

But he still wasn’t good enough. He’s never good enough when it counts.

“You’re so good,” Alex murmurs against the back of his head, “so fucking good,” and it’s a lie but it feels so good to hear it. It feels good to let go of everything else and just feel Alex’s hands on him and his words in Dylan’s ear and the heat of his body at Dylan’s back. Maybe it would look weird, if the Ackermans came in and saw them lying like this, but Dylan can’t bring himself to care. He’s taking this for as long as Alex will give it to him.

***

Dylan goes back to playing with the Otters. They play, and they score, and they win. They’re at the top of the O; Dylan can talk about that when he talks to Connor or Mitch, instead of World Juniors or the travesty that is his career in the NHL. Things are almost—sort of—back to some kind of normal.

Mostly. Dylan can hear Alex jerking off at night now.

He’s never heard much through the walls of the Ackermans’ house before. Wolf ears are better than human but only by a little bit. So he’s not expecting it. The first time he hears it he’s not even sure what he’s hearing. He’s coming out of a light sleep, sometime after midnight, and he thinks maybe it’s a leftover from a dream—a warm one, a dream that’s still running hot through his veins. Then he hears a choked-off gasp, and he knows it’s real.

He also knows it’s Alex. Not that there are many other candidates. But he knows it the way he knows Alex’s voice when he speaks. That’s Alex’s breath stuttering, and that means it must also be Alex’s hand sliding slickly over skin.

He can’t…he can’t actually be hearing this. He’s never heard anything like this before. And yeah, wolf hearing is selective—Dylan would go crazy if he couldn’t damp it down on a daily basis—but it’s not like this is something he _wants_ to hear. And Alex isn’t even being loud: there’s no voice behind his gasps, and there’s only so loud you can be by just breathing. But there’s nothing else it could be.

Maybe the Ackermans did something to the pipes while Dylan was at World Juniors, so that they now perfectly carry the little harsh gasps of Alex working himself up. Yeah.

Dylan shifts on the sheets. Heat is prickling over his skin. He wants to be able tune it out again so he can get back to sleep, but he can’t stop hearing it. Alex must be getting close, to judge by his breathing. His cock is probably hard and hot, slick with whatever he’s using. Dylan finds himself trying to picture it: he’s seen Alex’s dick soft, but never hard, never full and thick and flushed red. He doesn’t know if it’s straight or curved or long or short or what, and not knowing means he can’t get the possibilities out of his head.

He wonders what Alex is thinking about. A guy, probably. Dylan wonders what Alex is like with a guy.

It’s like in the hallway at that house party. Once Dylan starts thinking about it, he can’t stop, and obviously he’s turned on by listening to someone else get off, so how he’s turned on and thinking about Alex and his cock is straining at his shorts. He rubs the heels of his hand over it.

He bets Alex is really good with a guy. Dylan bets he smiles a lot, and laughs, and puts his hands on the guy, like—like he puts his hands on Dylan sometimes. Only more so. Putting his hands on another guy with the intention of getting him worked up. Both of them getting worked up, maybe, like, pressing up against each other, their cocks—their cocks—hot bulges in their shorts, rubbing together for more friction as they got more and more into it. Alex’s hands would be on the guy’s ass, pulling him in harder. A grinding squeeze, jolting their cocks together, making them—making them—

Alex makes this choked sound in the other room, and Dylan comes all over his own fingers.

The smell of his own spunk fills the room as his heart rate slows. It’s quiet from the next room, too; either Alex has finished, or Dylan just can’t hear him anymore. That’s good; he doesn’t want to have to think about this anymore.

***

He hooks up with a girl at the next party the Otters go to. They end up in a spare bedroom, one with a locking door, and Dylan doesn’t usually full-on fuck girls at parties in other people’s houses, but he takes it in that direction this time, working her up with his mouth on her clit and then fucking her when she smells hot and eager.

He’s on top. She’s small, with high round breasts that quiver when he fucks her, and he comes without a problem. He’s into it.

Later that night, he’s at home, on the verge of falling asleep, and he listens to Alex jerking off and remembers the scent of his skin in the cab on the way home and comes again into his own hand, so hard he sees stars.

He just can’t stop thinking about it. What it might have been like if Alex had been with someone, a guy, on that bed where Dylan fucked the girl. Dylan thinks he might be okay if he could just watch once—could just know what it’s like, Alex with a guy, so that he stops wondering and turning the possibilities over in his head. It’s the curiosity more than anything.

He almost asks about it. Not if he can watch—he’s not insane. Just, what Alex does with guys. Maybe Alex likes to get fucked—or maybe Alex is the one doing the fucking, cock shoving into someone, giving them what they want. Dylan bets Alex has a good cock. Not too big, maybe, just like Alex, but solid, thick. He probably knows how to use it. Probably handles it like he handles the puck, always knowing the right way to score.

Dylan might be getting a little obsessed.

He doesn’t think Alex has noticed anything. Dylan’s pretty much acting the same around him, he’s pretty sure, and it’s not like Alex can hear _Dylan_ jerking off through their shared wall at the same time he does. Which Dylan is trying not to do anymore. Mostly. It’s worked once or twice.

The thing is, it’s unfair that Alex doesn’t get to date anyone. Alex would be, like, the best boyfriend. He’s really good at cuddling, and at thinking about what Dylan needs, and they’re only friends, so it would probably be even better if he had a boyfriend. He’s also just super awesome to spend time with, and he has the best sense of humor. Guys would be all over Alex if he were out, but he can’t be yet, and it’s unfair. Dylan thinks maybe if Alex had someone, it would be easier to picture what they would be like together, and that would make it easier to stop thinking about.

Since he can’t make that happen, he tries to focus on hockey instead. He’s working out a lot these days, trying to build bulk that will stay even through the end of the season. The problem with that is that Alex is doing it too, and it’s making his arms and shoulders bigger and more defined and Dylan keeps getting distracted while they’re lifting with the thought of what it would be like if a guy bit at that muscle and maybe pressed Alex against the side of the ab machine.

Dylan’s really not sure what’s wrong with him.

Anyway, it gets easier to focus on hockey as the season goes on, because the team is killing it. They’re heading for first in the OHL if they keep this up, and Alex is leading the league in points. He and Dylan are both averaging more than two points per game, and this is what it feels like to play hockey when everything’s going right. That electric feeling of clicking with your linemates, with your D, charging down the ice and making things happen just by wishing it.

Dylan gets asked to be captain again in February. He feels a little bad about taking it from Petty, but it’s management’s decision and also he knows this is something he can do. He can lead the team by example, and he can make the speeches in the locker room, and he can go around to the guys who are having trouble and say what he needs to. He can stand on his own two feet here.

It’s his last season with them. Last year he thought it was, but this year it has to be: he’s aging out. Alex doesn’t have the same guarantee—but Dylan is pretty sure he’ll be up in the NHL next year regardless. Alex is so good; playing on a line with him is incendiary. It wasn’t even this good with Connor, when they ended up on the ice together. Dylan and Connor played well together, but not the way he and Alex do; Dylan never had the instinctive knowledge of where Connor was on the ice. With Alex, it’s like he doesn’t even need to look for the passes to connect and the plays to happen.

They make it to the playoffs. It’s not a surprise: they’re leading the league. There’s a full-moon night the day after they clinch, and Dylan cannot stand still, running circles around Alex in the field. Alex laughs and waits until Dylan pauses and then pounces on him. They end up wrestling on the chilly March grass under the light of the moon.

Dylan’s been the wolf more around Alex lately, even when it’s not a full moon. He feels like he’s going to betray himself by doing something weird, otherwise. It’s easier when he’s a wolf, because sex just isn’t a thing for wolves—like, obviously it’s a thing for real wolves, but not so much for werewolves in wolf form. So the wolf form is safer. He can take the whole mess of whatever the fuck is going on with him and shove it in a corner and cuddle up to his favorite person for some ear scratches.

They defeat Sarnia in four games in the first round of playoffs. Dylan feels supercharged when that fourth game ends: this is hockey at its very best; this is how it should be always. The team throws a huge party at Maxy’s billet and they all get smashed to celebrate having a week off before the next round.

Dylan is a little worried going into it—he hasn’t been drunk around Alex since his whole weird whatever-it-is obsession thing started—so he decides he should probably find a girl and hook up pretty early on. But the team is all there, hyped up and high on their own victory, and Dylan can’t resist that kind of team spirit. He gets distracted from the friend-of-a-friend he was dancing with and ends up in a mob of Otters, jumping wildly to the music.

Sometime after midnight Taylor starts reviving the “Otters hold hands” thing, going around to everyone and taking their hands in his. Dylan had kind of forgotten about that—it was more of a thing when Connor was captain. People are getting kind of into it now, though, laughing and holding each other’s hands while they dance, and Dylan’s the captain. He should lead by example.

Alex is dancing next to him. Dylan reaches down and takes his hand. “Otters hold hands,” he says, feeling dumb, even though Alex is looking at him with laughter in his face and obviously doesn’t think anything of it. His hand is warm and dry, firm against Dylan’s, and Dylan wonders if he can feel the way Dylan’s pulse is racing. Dylan can smell him: more strongly than he could a minute ago, as if the skin-to-skin contact has made Alex’s scent more accessible, filling his nose above everyone else’s. It’s weird that it feels like so much—a hand isn’t all that much surface area, and they’ve touched more than this lots of times. But it feels different. More intense. Dylan can’t really focus on anything else.

It’s almost a relief when Ciri takes his other hand, and some other guys latch onto their chain. But then it breaks up and it’s just Dylan and Alex holding each other’s hands for another couple of minutes, and Dylan feels the warmth on his palm long after they separate.

***

London is tougher to beat than Sarnia; it takes the Otters all seven games to get through. Then they take down Owen Sound in six.

Dylan is relieved: the seventh game against Owen Sound would have been on a full-moon night. That would have sucked big time.

As it is, the full moon falls two days before their first game against Mississauga, so Dylan tells Alex he doesn’t have to come to the field with him.

“Why not?” Alex asks, more startled than Dylan expected.

“I mean, you can if you want to,” Dylan says. “I just thought, you know, game in two days. You might not want to be up all night.”

“Oh,” Alex says. “No, I mean—we always get sleep. And it’s the last one, right?”

Is it? Dylan hadn’t looked ahead at the dates—but yeah, now that he’s thinking about it, even if they make it to the Memorial Cup final, they won’t quite hit another full moon. He doesn’t know how the year’s disappeared so fast.

It’s a scary thought, and he’s glad to have Alex with him for the last full moon. It’s a warm night—one of the first few they’ve had—and they run around the field even longer than usual, and then they get to curl up in Dylan’s bed, and Dylan wakes up the next day ready to face the Steelheads.

Mississauga is coming off a week-long rest, but the Otters win the first two games anyway. They start to falter after that: Alex and Dylan both score in the third game, but Mississauga wins it—and then Erie wins the fourth, and they’re sitting on a 3-1 lead going into the fifth game.

Dylan can’t get anything in the net for the whole game. But he assists on Taylor’s goal to tie things up at the end of the third. Then they’re in overtime and Alex passes to him and he passes to Ciri and it goes in and they just won the Cup.

They just _won the Cup._

Dylan is going to scream forever.

He kind of does: he screams, and wraps his arms around Alex, and then there are other teammates around and he wraps his arms around everyone and they all go down in a huge screaming group on the ice.

It’s the best night of Dylan’s life. He’s not even sure what happens for a lot of it, but the whole team is there, screaming and hugging and crying, his _team,_ his _pack,_ they were so _good._ Dylan’s never going to belong to anything better than this. He can’t even imagine anything better than this.

Someone brings a lot of alcohol to the afterparty, of course, and they get totally wrecked on champagne and shots and these weird mixed drinks Darren’s making. Dylan’s amazed the floor doesn’t fall in, the way they’re dancing to the music, and somewhere around three a.m. they end up at someone’s backyard pool and Fergy dares Dylan to jump in, which he isn’t going to do, of course, but he’s stumbling to get away from the edge and Alex is laughing next to him and then _Alex_ falls in so of course Dylan has to jump in after him, and six of their teammates follow suit.

It’s a terrible idea. They’re freezing and wet and running through the backyards of Erie at three-thirty in the morning, trying to shriek quietly so no one calls the police, and Dylan’s never been happier in his life.

He and Alex sneak back into their billet at five in the morning, still tipsy enough to bump into each other on their way through the kitchen, and grab towels from the hall closet so they can dry off in the downstairs bathroom without waking the Ackermans. Alex keeps saying, “We can be quiet, we can be quiet,” but he’s giggling while he says it, and Dylan knows they can’t but is giggling too hard to argue the point. They end up in the downstairs bathroom anyway, toweling their hair and shivering as they pull off the wettest layers of clothing.

“Here, you’ve got,” Alex says, rubbing at blades of grass that are stuck to Dylan’s collarbone from when a bunch of them accidentally rolled down a hill, and now Alex’s hands are on his chest and his hair is sticking up from the towel and his eyes are this really, really bright blue and Dylan is standing there in his boxers and he did not think this through.

“That was crazy,” he says, pulling words out at random.

“I know, totally crazy,” Alex says, and he’s standing really close and his lips look really pink and Dylan’s stomach is doing a long, slow, hot roll.

“Here,” he says, grabbing another towel to pass to Alex. He takes one himself and throws it over his head and dries his hair some more, breathing in the smell of laundry detergent to get the scent of Alex out of his nose.

Alex probably hasn’t hooked up all of playoffs. _Dylan_ hasn’t hooked up all of playoffs, but he could, if he wanted to, one of these nights when they’re out with the team, and—and that just seems really unfair. Alex should be able to hook up. He deserves to hook up.

“We should go to a club,” he says while he’s wrapping towels around himself.

“Huh?” Alex says, which is weird, because what Dylan said totally made sense. He thinks. Huh. Maybe he’s still drunk.

“So you can hook up,” Dylan says. “’Cause, you know. Team parties.”

“You didn’t hook up tonight,” Alex says.

“Obvs, no, tonight was about team.” Team parties are the best. Dylan remembers the team all together after the first round victory, Alex’s hand in his, and shivers. “But later. We should go somewhere, like. Wherever you usually hook up.”

Alex is grinning at him. Dylan’s annoyed. Alex should take this seriously.

“No, I mean it,” he insists.

“Okay,” Alex says, still grinning. “Okay, we will.”

***

Dylan isn’t sure Alex actually remembers that conversation the next day. They’re both a wreck when they wake up, lying on the couch with the shades drawn until mid-afternoon with water and Tylenol in easy reach. Dylan shifts to wolf for part of the time, not because it makes the pain go away—he wishes that were how it worked—but because at least it’s easier to deal with the pain in the wolf body. Human brains want to _think_ so much.

He’s not sure Alex remembers because Alex doesn’t bring it up. Dylan’s kind of relieved: it was probably a dumb idea. But also he doesn’t quite want to let it go. He waits until they’re getting ready to meet the guys for dinner, and then he says, “So, the thing about going to a club.”

Alex is doing something with his hair in the mirror. He looks dumb with the blond—they all do—but his hair still looks good, falling over his forehead. “I don’t think Erie really has clubs,” he says.

That seems plausible. Erie has bars and shit, but actually Dylan isn’t really sure where the line is between a bar and a club. Maybe there are gay bars here. “So where do you, uh.”

“I don’t know, friends of friends?” Alex says. He’s scrubbing his hand over the back of his head. “I’m not really, uh. That organized about it.”

“Okay, so,” Dylan says. “We should try the club thing. Bar thing. Whatever.”

Alex shrugs. “I mean, if you want, I’m game.”

It turns out that Eerie does have clubs. Or, one, at least, which turns up when Dylan searches “gay club erie pa” the next day (with private search on, he’s not an idiot). “The Zone?” Alex repeats skeptically.

“It has a decent Yelp rating,” Dylan says, cocking his head at the picture.

It’s a 21+ club, so they’ll have to use their fake IDs. Dylan doesn’t think they’ll have too much trouble, with his height and Alex’s stubble. “Plus it’s a Sunday,” Alex says. “It’s gotta be pretty low-key on a Sunday.”

It might be a reason not to go tonight. But they’re leaving for the Memorial Cup tournament at the end of the week, so they don’t have a lot of time.

They make their excuses to the other guys who are planning tonight’s parties. “What do you _mean_ you’re going somewhere else?” Taylor asks indignantly when they’re leaving the group dinner.

“Important business,” Dylan says, smirking at them, hooking his finger in Alex’s jacket cuff.

He likes the feeling of going off with Alex alone, even if he’s getting kind of nervous about where they’re going. Is he supposed to, like, wear something special? Or would that make him look gay? He doesn’t want to confuse people.

“Worried the guys won’t hit on you?” Alex asks when Dylan fiddles with his t-shirt on the walk from the car.

“Shut up,” Dylan says, smoothing his shirt. He just doesn’t want to look weird, is all.

There’s no line. The bouncer looks at their IDs, then at them. Dylan does his best to look bland and like the owner of a 21+ ID.

“Cover’s ten bucks,” the bouncer says.

Inside it’s dark and there’s this slow pulsing music. It’s only ten p.m., so it’s not very crowded, but also it’s Sunday night so it’s probably not going to get crowded. There are enough people here for Alex to pick someone up. That’s all that matters.

Dylan notices the other group of wolves as soon as he crosses the room. They’re off in a corner, a half-dozen of them, men and women, and they smell like a pack. One of them is an alpha.

Dylan’s back stiffens immediately. There’s no reason for it—it’s not like another pack would give him trouble, and it’s not a full moon, so he doesn’t even need to give them space. The other alpha isn’t going to come challenge him for, you know, sitting in a bar. He doesn’t have anything to worry about.

“What’s up?” Alex says when he gets to the table with their beers.

“Not much,” Dylan says. “Uh, there’s a group of wolves over there.”

“Oh.” Alex looks over at that corner of the room. “Do we need to leave?”

“No, it’s fine,” Dylan says. He just wishes he didn’t feel like they were looking at him. “Um, so, you want to talk to people?”

“We can drink our beers first,” Alex says.

There’s some dancing happening by the time their beers are gone, so they go to the dance floor. Dylan’s always felt like kind of a hopeless dancer: he’s okay when he’s moving someone’s hips with his, or when it’s just the team jumping up and down to music, but he doesn’t have any, like, actual style. It makes him want to stick close to Alex, but that would defeat the purpose here.

Alex—Alex can dance. Dylan already knew that from team parties. He doesn’t do all that much with his hips, but he does this thing with his shoulders that’s probably popping or locking or something but either way looks really cool.

Dylan bets people are looking at him.

He tries to keep his distance a little. His whole reason for coming here was that Alex should get to pick someone up. Alex doesn’t seem to be really focused on that: he’s just dancing, focusing on the music. But Alex is cool. He probably has game. Dylan bets he’s already scoping people out.

He’s kind of expecting something to happen with Alex and someone else pretty quickly, so when it doesn’t after twenty minutes or so of dancing, he starts to relax. Then he looks away and looks back, and there’s someone talking to Alex.

It’s this tallish guy, not as tall as Dylan, thin and wearing glasses. He looks kind of like a nerd, but a nerd who’s actually good-looking, like he has a job doing a smart-person thing, and he’s smiling at Alex and Alex is laughing at something he’s saying and Dylan stops dancing.

He’s not expecting it: the wave of cold that goes over him. This is what they came here for, after all. But now Dylan’s standing on the dance floor, not moving, watching Alex smile at this guy and he suddenly wants to be anywhere in the world but here.

It takes a minute before Dylan manages to stumble off the dance floor. He…he’s just gonna go back to his table. Just gonna take a break.

The other alpha is still in the far corner with her pack. Dylan looks down at the table so he doesn’t have to know if she’s looking at him.

He stands there for maybe five minutes, telling himself that this was actually the thing he asked for and why is he being such a weirdo about it, and then he sees Alex coming towards him from the dance floor.

Alex is alone. Dylan’s chest unlocks, and he can breathe again. “You get tired of dancing?” Alex asks.

“Just needed a breather,” Dylan says. “That, uh, guy seem like anything?”

Alex shrugs. “Just a guy. You want another round?”

They get another beer, and while they’re at the bar Alex starts talking to this guy with one of those hipster haircuts that’s all long on top. This time Dylan is right next to him, and he stares down at the bubbles around the edges of his beer. It’s worse when he can hear Alex’s voice sounding all happy while he talks to this other guy, but he’s not about to move away. His arm is still brushing Alex’s shoulder.

That guy goes away, back to the people he came with. Then Dylan and Alex are at the bar for a while. Dylan keeps getting distracted from their conversation, darting his eyes around and wondering who the next person is who’ll come talk to Alex.

“Let’s dance some more,” he says, when that gets too exhausting.

They drain their beers and go back to the dance floor, which has gotten more crowded since they left. That makes it a little easier, actually, since everyone’s dancing close and Dylan doesn’t have to worry about where to stand. But there are all these people near Alex and it’s making him feel shaky and out of place.

Then the crowd shifts, and he realizes the alpha and her pack are dancing nearby.

The alpha is bonded. He can smell that. Plus she’s a woman. Alex wouldn’t even be interested. But two of the wolves aren’t—her pack members—they’re guys, unbonded, and Dylan wants to throw himself in front of Alex and shield him from sight.

He’s obviously not going to do that. It’s a totally ridiculous impulse. Alex came here to pick up, and so what if he picks up a wolf? But Dylan’s heart is pounding really hard at the thought of it, and he wants—he wants—

Dylan closes his eyes and breathes out, slowly. When he breathes in again his nose fills with Alex. 

He opens his eyes. Alex is right in front of them.

“Hey,” Alex says into his ear, over the music. He’s close enough that his shoulder brushes Dylan’s chest when he leans up. Dylan’s mouth is suddenly very dry. “Don’t look now, but that guy behind you is putting on the moves.”

“What?” Dylan says blankly. He looks over his shoulder, and there’s some guy there, really close to him. He quirks an eyebrow at Dylan, and Dylan jumps, flustered, and moves away as best he can.

Alex is laughing at him. Dylan glares at him as they make their way to another part of the crowd. If it happens to be farther from the wolf pack, well, that’s a nice bonus.

They stay another hour. Alex talks to three more guys, and Dylan feels sick like maybe he drank too much beer even though he really didn’t, and then Alex says, “I’m pretty much ready to get out of here. You?”

“But you didn’t—” Dylan says, then stops himself. “Uh, yeah, let’s go.”

It’s a relief to step out onto the pavement. The air is fresh and clean and there’s no one there but him and Alex, walking to the car. Dylan feels like he just got through the world’s longest practice or something.

“So that was fun,” Alex says, half-laughing.

“Yeah, except you didn’t get any,” Dylan says. It feels safe to joke about it, now that they’re out.

“Hey, that guy behind you, you were closer to getting some than I was,” Alex says. “You sure you don’t want to go back and find him?”

“Ha ha,” Dylan says, sticking his tongue out.

He only had two beers and they were a while ago, so he drives them home. They’re quiet on the drive. When they’re on their street, Alex says, “Thanks. For taking me there.”

“You’re welcome,” Dylan says. He feels suddenly stiff, and he focuses on the road ahead of them. “It was, you know, cool.”

“Learning experience,” Alex says, giving him a wry look.

“Not the kind of experience I’m looking to learn about,” Dylan jokes as he pulls the car into the driveway.

His body feels funny. Like—like Alex is too far away, even though it’s not like he was very close tonight. Dylan keeps having the impulse to reach out, put his hand on Alex somewhere.

There were a few times tonight when Alex was dancing close. Not hooking-up close, but just because it was crowded or when they were leaning in to talk. It was close enough that Dylan wouldn’t have had to do much to make them be closer. His hands were so close to Alex’s waist already.

He stops the car, and Alex gets out, and Dylan follows him into the house.

Alex takes his turn in the bathroom first. Dylan waits outside, and then, when Alex is heading back to his bedroom with a little grin at Dylan as he passes, Dylan says, “Hey. I guess I, ah, actually would be curious.”

Alex turns back. “Curious about what?”

Dylan’s stopped in the doorway to the bathroom, and his pulse is thundering in his ears. “Um. What it’s like. You know, to be with a guy.”

Alex looks at him for a long minute. “We could go back sometime,” he says. “If you—”

“No,” Dylan says quickly. “I don’t—not a stranger. It’s—I mean, you know. Wolf thing.” He can barely get his mouth to form words. His pulse is going totally crazy. “I would only. With a friend. Someone I knew.”

“Okay,” Alex says. “Well. We could do that. If you, you know. If you want.”

Dylan can’t even look at him. There’s a silence where Dylan breathes in the thought of it, of what it might be like, and his body seizes with tension and with other, less-explicable things.

“You should think about it,” Alex says, and then he’s leaving, and Dylan stands in the doorway, breathing hard and feeling the lingering traces of Alex’s scent work their way through his body.


	4. Chapter 4

Dylan does think about Alex’s offer. He thinks about it in the shower while he pants against the wall, hand moving fast and slick over his cock, and then he climbs into bed and thinks about it some more. He might stay up later than he should listening to see if there’ll be any sounds from the other side of the wall. He doesn’t hear anything, though, and he’s not sure what that means.

“So, uh,” he says the next morning, when they’ve made themselves smoothies and are waiting to see what the guys have decided to do for their last practice-free day. He’s across the kitchen from Alex, so it feels safe to say something. “What you said last night. What did you think that would, uh. What would it, like, involve?”

His voice is cracking. It’s so embarrassing. He can’t even raise his eyes.

“I don’t know,” Alex says. “What would you want it to involve?”

Dylan’s face is so red. He was not made to handle this. “Um,” he says. He leans against the kitchen island with his smoothie instead of sitting at the table with Alex. “What do you usually do, you know, with guys?”

“Like, different stuff,” Alex says. “You know. Hands. Blowjobs. Um, anal, sometimes.”

These are not things Dylan should hear coming out Alex’s mouth. He’s gonna be—well, maybe he’ll have other stuff to jerk off to. If they do this. He can’t even drink his smoothie right now; he’s just holding onto it for dear life. “So you, um, do that?”

“I mean, I have,” Alex says. “It’s not like I’m, like, fucking guys left and right in Erie.”

“Right,” Dylan says. Right. He’s not gonna hyperventilate here. “So you.” He has to get this question out. “You’re the one who, uh.”

“Oh,” Alex says. “No, I mean, I’ve. Done both.” And then, casually: “You can fuck me if you want.”

“Jesus fuck,” Dylan says, letting his head drop. Alex should just not say things like that to people. People need to, like, live. Their hearts need to keep beating.

“So—yeah?” Alex asks, sounding uncertain.

“Um, yeah,” Dylan says. “Yeah. Sorry, I just—but yeah. That sounds good. We can do that.”

“Okay.” He’s getting up; Dylan can see him out of the corner of his eye. He can’t look directly at him. He’s, like, too bright to look at right now. “I’ll go out and get some stuff.”

“Oh,” Dylan says. That seems really—“Were you thinking—today?”

“Maybe, or—tomorrow, maybe?” Alex is in the doorway. “Since the guys will want to go out tonight, and we have early practice tomorrow. We could maybe do it after.”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, feeling the word squeeze itself out of his throat. “That sounds good.”

Alex leaves, and a minute or two later Dylan hears the car start. He goes upstairs to jerk off furiously.

***

It was possibly a mistake to put it off till tomorrow. They go out with the guys that night, and Dylan jerked off twice while Alex was at the store, but he’s still so conscious of where Alex is every moment. Which is mostly near Dylan. Alex is this constant presence at Dylan’s elbow, and Dylan can’t stop thinking about what it will be like when he gets to be closer than this. Will Alex let him put his hands all over him? Will he kiss him?

The scent of Alex is so strongly in his nose. He can barely taste his food for it.

Dylan has no idea what anyone talks about for most of the evening. They go home, and Dylan gets into bed and pretends he’s not listening for anything, but as soon as he hears the first soft sigh from the other side of the wall, he presses his face into his pillow and wraps his hand around his cock.

He gets hard so fast, listening to this. He wonders what Alex is doing over there—fingering himself? Dylan’s never touched himself there, doesn’t know if it would feel good. He tries to imagine it, though. Alex likes it, so there’s obviously something good there. Something good in a thick cock pinning him down, pressing on his insides, forcing him open.

Dylan sucks in air and tightens his hand on his cock. Maybe he should try it. So that he knows what it’ll be like when he does it to Alex. His cock is leaking enough right now that he could probably just rub his finger in it, slide it back behind his balls…but probably that would be weird. He shouldn’t do that.

He moves his hand faster on his cock instead, and comes to the rhythm of Alex’s stuttering breath.

He wakes up in the morning and feels it like the day of a major tournament: that immediate adrenaline rush that propels him into alertness. Today is the day. Today he and Alex are going to—yeah.

First Dylan has to get through practice. He’s jittery the whole time, overcharged, fumbling easy plays. He’s messing up everyone on the ice with him, Alex included. He feels terrible about it but he can’t fix it.

“Okay, some of you have obviously been celebrating too much,” Coach Knoblauch says, and makes them stay so late that the guys with school are scrambling to get out of the shower in time to make it to class.

Dylan and Alex are among the guys who don’t have anything to rush to. They hang back to let the younger guys shower first and also because that practice was the kind that makes you want to move slowly after. “Shit, I am beat,” Taylor says, stretching. “You guys want to hang, play some XBox?”

“Nah, I need a nap,” Alex says, and Dylan ducks his head and doesn’t say anything.

They’re silent in the car on the way back. Dylan can’t think of a single thing to say. He doesn’t think he’d be able to get any words out if he did think of them. He stares at the road while Alex drives.

Are they gonna do it right away? They haven’t talked about that. Dylan follows Alex into the house, dropping their gear, and his hands shake as he unties his sneakers.

“So,” Alex says, and the laces slip out of Dylan’s fingers.

Fuck. When did breathing get this difficult?

“You wanna do this?” Alex asks.

Dylan breathes out and gives up on the knot in his laces. “Yeah,” he says, standing up and toeing off his shoe. “I mean, I’m still up for it. If you are.”

“Cool,” Alex says. He like maybe he’s nervous, but why would Alex be nervous? He’s done this before. “My room?”

“Yeah.” Dylan wouldn’t have had the guts to ask for that, probably, but he does want that. The idea of doing this with the scent of Alex all around him is…yeah.

Alex’s room smells as good as it always does. Dylan is, like, shaking, somewhere deep inside that he doesn’t know how to shut down.

“We don’t have to do this right now,” Alex says. He’s standing in front of Dylan, his shoulders and neck and jaw and face and Dylan’s going to get to touch him. “We can just—”

“No,” Dylan says. “No, let’s. I mean. Yeah.”

“Okay,” Alex says.

Alex is the one who moves toward him, while Dylan is still trying to figure out what to do. Alex touches him: one hand on Dylan’s waist and the other on his shoulder.

Dylan breathes out, a shuddering breath. Alex touching him is good. It’s always good. He doesn’t know why he thought it was scary. Except it is scary, because they’re going to touch a lot more than this, and what if Dylan is weird about it? What if Alex notices and is weirded out.

He leans down and rests his mouth against the top of Alex’s head. It’s Alex. It’s his smell and his skin and the rhythm of his breath and it’ll be okay. It has to be okay. 

Alex slides a hand up to the back of Dylan’s neck and pulls his head down and kisses him.

Alex is kissing him. Dylan makes a noise and opens his mouth just a little. Alex tastes—it’s like smelling him, only more, only better, and the taste of him gets into Dylan’s mouth and into his belly and makes everything warmer. Turns cold to warm and warm to heat. Dylan kisses back, licking eagerly at the little space between Alex’s lips.

Alex laughs. “Yeah,” he says, and tilts his head more and open his mouth to meet Dylan’s tongue with his own. Dylan grips his arms and welcomes Alex’s tongue into his mouth.

It’s hard to kiss and breathe at the same time. Dylan’s never had this much trouble with it before, but he can’t remember ever feeling quite so thrown by a kiss before, either. Alex is keeping the pace slow at first, and that makes Dylan crazy, desperate for more—but then things slip and speed up and then he feels even _more_ desperate, both of them breathing hard and sucking and licking and trying to take in as much as they can.

Dylan feels like he would maybe happily stand here and make out with Alex forever. He’s so lost to it that he almost doesn’t notice Alex walking them toward the bed until his knees hit the mattress. He sits down with a thunk. “Sweatshirt,” Alex says, and his eyes rake over Dylan’s chest while Dylan wrestles his sweatshirt off over his head and his t-shirt with it. “Yeah,” Alex says, and straddles him, knees on either side of his thighs and kisses him more. Stubble scraping, tongues curling around each other, not enough. Dylan can’t believe he never did this before. What have they been doing the last two years?

Alex pulls his own shirt off while they kiss, breaking to get it over his head before bending down for Dylan’s mouth again. Then Dylan has bare skin under his hands, hot from being under clothes, smooth under his palms while Alex licks into his mouth. It’s so much. Alex keeps giving him more than he looks for: Dylan’s barely getting used to his mouth, and here’s his back, and his chest, pressing against Dylan’s like a gift of touch.

The scent of him is everywhere. It fills Dylan’s nose and mouth and the palms of his hands; it surrounds him like a warm touch when Alex tips him back onto the bed. It’s such a good scent. Dylan wants to eat it; he wants to lick Alex all over, neck and shoulders and thighs and—and cock. He wants Alex’s cock in his mouth. The desire jolts through him, pulling a moan out of his throat, and Alex rolls his hips down rocks his thigh against Dylan’s cock.

It’s so much. Dylan can’t think. Alex rolls Dylan’s nipple between his fingers while he rocks down against Dylan’s cock, and Dylan’s losing what little control he had. Then Alex moves his mouth down and sucks at the curve of Dylan’s neck and—

“Stop,” Dylan gasps, shuddering. “You gotta stop, or I’m gonna—”

Alex pulls back, panting, his lips red and his cheeks flushed. “Really?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Dylan mumbles. He knows it’s pathetic. It’s just—Alex’s mouth, and the pressure on his cock—

“No, ’s hot,” Alex says, breath puffing out in a laugh. He looks so happy. Dylan leans up to kiss him some more.

Dylan bites back a protest when Alex rolls off him to get the stuff out of his nightstand. But also it’s good to just look at him for a minute. Dylan leans back and watches the way he’s still smiling a little, the way he sucks his bottom lip into his mouth while the rummages in the drawer. Then he straightens up and shoots Dylan a little grin before he starts stripping off his pants.

He might be laughing at himself a little, but fuck if he doesn’t look really good. Dylan can’t look away. Alex is wearing boxer-briefs under his jeans, and his cock is a thick bulge straining at the cloth, dark where it’s damp at the tip. Then he pulls his underwear down and his cock bounces up, red and sticky and _oh._

Dylan swallows hard. He was wrong: Alex’s cock isn’t small. It’s long, maybe longer than Dylan’s, and thick, curving up towards his stomach. The sight of it makes Dylan’s abs clench and his mouth get wet, and then Alex is climbing back onto the bed with him and Dylan can touch him, running his hands down Alex’s sides, not quite brave enough to touch his cock yet but so aware of it.

Alex has the bottle of lube. “Do you want to?” he asks, pressing it into Dylan’s hand.

Dylan closes his hand around the bottle. His heart is thundering in his ears. He could just do it—could slick his fingers and open Alex up. It would probably be good—Dylan likes fucking people—it would be—

He moves his leg a little, his thigh pressing up against Alex’s cock, and Alex sucks in a little breath. Dylan is already panting. He doesn’t want to be weird about this, doesn’t want Alex to think—it’s Alex. Dylan’s already been so weird around Alex so many times before, and it’s always been okay.

“Actually,” he hears himself say, and his whole face flushes hot, heat spreading up from his neck. “What if, um. Like. What if instead you, um. Did it to me?”

“Oh,” Alex says, surprised but not in a bad way. “Yeah,” he says, laughing a little, and leans closer and kisses Dylan. “Yeah, I can do that.”

They get Dylan’s jeans off. Dylan’s hands are clumsy with the thought of what’s coming next.

“I’m gonna put on the condom first, ’kay?” Alex says, and he rolls it onto himself, fingers deft over that thick hard cock, and Dylan has to swallow a couple of times. He wants this. Admitting it is like—like letting open a dam, and now everything’s flooding with how badly he wants this. He wants _so much._

“You ever finger yourself?” Alex asks. Then, when Dylan shakes his head, “You never wanted to?”

“I.” He can feel Alex’s hand on his hip, fingers spreading to massage his ass. “I just never.” He tucks his face close to Alex’s. “Want you to.”

“Fuck. Yeah.” It sounds like Alex’s breath has been punched out of him. “Tell me if it hurts, ’kay?”

Alex’s fingers are maybe a little clumsy as he slicks lube on them. That makes Dylan feel better about how much of a mess he is right now. Then Alex slides his fingers into the crack of Dylan’s ass and presses on his hole.

It sends a little shock through Dylan’s belly, and makes him jump. It feels—is it good? He’s not sure. Then Alex rubs his finger around the outside of Dylan’s hole and it _is_ good. He does that until Dylan is groaning from it, and then he slips the tip inside.

Dylan’s scalp is tingling. It’s so—it’s so strange. He tips his head back on the pillow and gasps as Alex works his finger farther inside. Then Alex’s finger slides past something else—presses—and Dylan just about jackknifes off the bed. “Fuck!” he shouts, and Alex laughs, a deep rolling sound from his belly.

“Fuck, this is so hot,” he says, licking into Dylan’s mouth again. Dylan kisses back greedily as Alex’s finger keeps stroking in, past that spot that’s making stars dance in front of Dylan’s eyes.

“’ve you—done this before?” Dylan manages to ask while being taken apart from the inside.

“A couple of times,” Alex says, his eyes on Dylan’s face, and maybe another time Dylan would feel possessive but the look Alex is giving him is so open, so focused on him, that Dylan feels like it’s only them here. It doesn’t matter if there’s been anyone else.

Alex works a second finger into him, and starts licking and sucking at Dylan’s neck so that Dylan can barely breathe for the dual stimulation. “You’re doing so good,” Alex says, working in a third, and Dylan honest-to-God whimpers. Maybe that’s something he should be embarrassed about, but he’s so far beyond embarrassment right now.

By the time Alex pulls his fingers out and starts slicking up his own cock, Dylan’s half out of his mind, tears leaking from his eyes. He never thought anything could feel like this. He’s not sure he’s ready at all for Alex’s cock—there’s so _much_ of it—but also he wants it, his hole clenching down on nothing, missing the fullness.

Alex puts his cock into position, the head of it pressing up against Dylan’s hole. This is what Dylan wouldn’t let himself think about when he came last night.

“I’m gonna—I’m gonna push in,” Alex says. He sounds breathless. “Is that okay?”

Dylan nods. “Yeah,” he says. His gut is full of fire and want. “Yeah, do it.”

The pressure is _so much._ But Alex is murmuring things to him, and his scent is all around, Dylan’s head swimming with it. Alex pushes, and pushes, and Dylan feels something inside of him give. Something tight and clenched that it’s a relief to break apart, and Alex slides in, in and in and in, until he’s fully seated and Dylan feels something wild and elated soaring through him.

“Holy fucking God, Dylan,” Alex gasps over him, a laugh in his voice and an edge of desperation, and Dylan lets out a sound that might be a laugh of his own. Then Alex is his hips, thrusting into him, head hanging while he sucks in air.

“Fuck,” Alex says. “Fuck, you’re so,” and Dylan says, “Yeah,” and then Alex hits that _spot,_ that _spot,_ the one that makes Dylan throw his head back and clench down so that Alex shouts.

Dylan grabs at his hands and laces their fingers together so that he can hold on. “Yes,” he says, “yes, yes,” and Alex answers him. In words, and in the rhythm of his thrusts, and in every time he slides against Dylan’s prostate and makes their fingers curl together and Dylan gulp for air.

He’s falling apart. He can feel it, can feel Alex doing the same thing, his breath getting ragged. Dylan wants to touch his cock but he doesn’t want to let go of Alex’s hands. And besides he doesn’t need it: he’s hurtling off into the abyss even without that, feeling it tip, tip, until he’s gone. He’s falling into Alex.

It slams through him like nothing he’s ever felt before. Alex is coming, too, crying out, and Dylan feels like he’s been thrown out of his body and into something new. Like his body is changing shape on him: like something enormous is hitting him, stretching him, and the pleasure and pain are mixing so that he can’t tell which is which.

The feeling narrows down to the base of his cock. There’s a throb of heat that he keepts expecting to fade, but it just seems to be growing more and more as his orgasm passes. Then his head clears a little and he realizes he’s popping a knot.

Dylan’s never done that before. Of course he’s never done that before—he knows better than to pop a knot inside someone. First rule of not bonding with someone. But this—this is outside of someone, and he didn’t know it could happen, but it is, and he can’t stop it.

He can’t let Alex see. That’s his first thought. He wants to curl up around it, shield it from sight, but Alex is still braced on top of him, arms trembling. There’s nowhere Dylan can hide.

“Oh,” Alex says. He’s looking down at Dylan’s cock, which is still hard and red and straining and swollen at the base. “Are you, uh—”

“It’s fine,” Dylan says quickly. Wishes he could crawl away. Wishes he could ignore the slow waves of pleasure that are throbbing through his body, like an orgasm only more drawn out. Wishes he didn’t want—didn’t want—

Alex puts his hand on the knot. Dylan cries out and shuts his eyes.

“Does that hurt?” Alex asks.

“No,” Dylan says. “No.” It feels like…like having sex again. The squeeze of Alex’s hand sends sharp pleasure all through his body. It’s like sex without the urgency: he’s not driving toward something; he just wants it to go on forever. There’s this bone-deep goodness warring with his worry about what Alex is thinking right now.

He opens his eyes. Alex is watching his face, looking for Dylan’s reactions. “This is…good,” Alex says, squeezing down. “Right?”

“Fuck,” Dylan says, the word punched out of him. “It’s…yeah, it’s so—”

Alex takes his hand away. Dylan blinks, disconcerted, but then Alex pulls out, taking care with the condom, and slides down the bed and—

“Oh fuck _yes_ ,” Dylan says, eyes closing and mouth dropping open as Alex licks up the side of his cock. He gets his hand on the shaft and mouths at the knot, and Dylan cries out again. The pleasure is so strong. It’s like Alex is licking over bare nerves. Dylan can hardly keep breathing.

Alex swaps his mouth and his hand, squeezing again on the aching throb of the knot and mouthing at the head. Dylan feels the touch melting all over his body, this wonderful heat sinking in everywhere. Then Alex sucks hard on the shaft, and a bright wave moves through him, more come spurting into Alex’s mouth.

Alex swallows it down, and does it again, and does it again, milking all the come out of Dylan’s cock. Then he climbs up the bed and kisses Dylan’s trembling mouth.

He keeps a hand wrapped firm and snug around Dylan’s knot while he does him. That grip—Dylan can’t get enough of it. He pushes into Alex’s hold and kisses him back and feels perfectly warm, and held, and safe, and exactly where he wants to be.

***

Dylan’s knot goes down after twenty minutes or so. By that point, they’re both sleepy, and Dylan’s just sort of nuzzling at Alex’s hair. Alex raises his head and yawns, and then says, “Flip you for first shower?”

Dylan doesn’t want to get up. Like, every part of him objects to the idea of not continuing to lie here, wrapped around Alex. But he also doesn’t want to seem weird, and their current state is probably pretty gross for a non-wolf, so he says, “Two bathrooms. We can both shower.”

Alex grins at him. “Deal.”

It’s weird, as they get up. It’s weird navigating clothes: Dylan sees Alex naked all the time, and he also just spent an hour or so with Alex’s hands all over his body, but they shouldn’t be naked around each other now, right? He’s not sure when to make that change. When do they go from people who touch each other naked to people who don’t do that so much, and who maybe wear clothes while they’re walking through the house to the bathroom?

He compromises by grabbing his clothes and walking quickly down the hall to the master bath.

They don’t use this bathroom all that much. Dylan feels weird going into it, even though the Ackermans said they could. It doesn’t smell right in here. It’s all the Ackermans’ bath products, none of his or Alex’s. And Alex is theoretically on the other side of the wall, in the hall bathroom, but it feels like he’s really far away. Dylan turns on the water and stands there shivering on the tile floor and feels like he’s in a stranger’s house.

He turns and looks at himself in the mirror. He looks startled: eyes a little wide, mouth red and swollen and chin and cheeks flushed with beard burn. He presses his fingers to his neck, his collarbone, his nipples, all the places Alex’s mouth and hands were. There are too many of them to touch. He wraps his arms around his middle, feeling tingly, feeling weird.

The water eventually gets hot, but Dylan still shivers under the spray. Using the Ackermans’ shower stuff feels weird, like he’s coating his body in someone else’s touch. He scrubs to get the scent of the body wash off of him.

When he gets to cleaning his ass, his fingers stutter before touching his opening. He feels tender there, a little sore, a little swollen. He rests his fingers there and hangs his head under the spray and breathes.

It was just a thing they did. Dylan asked for it, and Alex did it. It’s not—it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change anything.

He closes his eyes against the memory: of Alex, his hand gripped tight around Dylan’s knot. Looking at him like it’s something amazing. Alex’s scent on his tongue, in his mouth, moving over him like a wave. Alex pushing him down and opening him up… 

Dylan tips his head back in the spray.

He finishes up as quickly as he can. There’s a weird pinging in his chest, like there’s something he’s looking for but he can’t remember what it was. It gets worse the logner he’s in the bathroom, so he pulls on the clothes he was wearing instead of taking the time to get new ones and goes down to the kitchen.

Alex is there, his hair wet from the shower, opening the fridge. “You want some eggs?” he asks, looking up from the fridge at Dylan, eyes bright. The pinging in Dylan’s chest calms down.

“Yeah, thanks,” Dylan says, and goes over to make toast.

The toaster is right next to the stove, so they end up standing close. Dylan can’t help sneaking glances to the side: he had that mouth on his just a little while ago. Those eyes were on him as Alex took him apart. He can’t stop overlaying the past on the present.

Sometimes Alex looks back, and Dylan looks away fast, cheeks flushing. He turns away to go to the fridge, but it’s like there’s a string between them: he can feel it stretch, then pull back taut when he goes back to the cutting board. Can feel it tug like it wants to pull them closer still.

Dylan focuses on buttering the toast. One piece, two, that organic olive-oil butter that Ciri turned them on to. Keeps his hands on the knife and the bread and the butter tub. Doesn’t reach over to touch the worn t-shirt Alex has on, the one he was wearing when Dylan first kissed him.

He smells like sex. Alex does. It’s fainter, after the shower, but it’s still there. Or maybe Dylan’s imagining it. The t-shirt is tight at Alex’s chest and then falls loosely to his waist, soft folds Dylan could smooth over with his fingers, and Dylan has to focus on the smell of the toast to get it out of his mind.

“So,” Alex says. “You feeling okay?”

“Yeah,” Dylan says quickly. Alex is standing in the sunlight from the window, and he looks so good, mouth still red from when Dylan’s mouth was there. Dylan looks away.

They don’t talk much while they eat. Dylan is focusing too hard maintaining his own personal space. It would be weird, if he leaned over and bumped Alex’s shoulder. Or tangled their ankles. There’s no reason for that. They just touched so much. Dylan can sit here and eat his eggs without touching for five minutes.

They finish eating, and they get up to clear their plates, and Alex says, “What do you think—Chel?” He puts a hand on Dylan’s back, and—

Dylan flinches away. If Alex starts to touch him, he’s gonna—and he can’t: he has to keep it together. So instead he jerks away, so quick and uncoordinated he stubs his toe on a cabinet.

“Oh,” he says, not looking at Alex. He can still feel the ghost of the touch on his back. “Oh. Um, yeah.”

It’s awkward sitting on the couch while they pick their teams. They usually squabble while they do it, trash-talking each other’s choices, but this time they’re silent, each of them taking a while to pick out their players. Dylan can’t focus on anything except how he’s _not_ touching Alex. And he’s sore, more so than he expected to be, his ass not happy with him for sitting upright right now.

“Hey,” Dylan says after a couple minutes. “Do you want to, I don’t know, watch something? I’m not sure I’m really feeling this.”

Alex darts a look at him, almost quick enough to miss. “Sure.”

He puts on the Preds-Ducks game they DVRed last night. They all kept an eye on the score last night, but they couldn’t find a restaurant that was showing it. “Looks like the Preds might actually have a shot at this,” Alex says.

“Uh-huh.” Dylan’s only sort of looking at the screen. He’s wondering how awful it would be if he leaned over and put his head in Alex’s lap. It’s nothing more than he’s done a million times, but it feels different now. Would it seem like he’s expecting something more? Would Alex think he was asking for too much?

He shifts a little, trying to find a position that’s comfortable to sit in. Alex’s hair is drying, holding the light again. Dylan feels a tug in his gut, like his entire stomach is trying to jump ship toward Alex. Like his muscles are fighting against themselves.

Gibson makes a save, and play stops. Dylan presses his lips between his teeth, blocks all thought from his mind, and then tips sideways, scootching a little over so that he can put his head on Alex’s thigh.

Every single muscle in his body is screaming with tension, waiting for whatever’s going to happen. But what happens is that Alex puts a hand on his shoulder and slides the other into his hair.

Dylan lets the air rush out of him. This is normal. It’s okay.

***

They fly to Windsor for the start of the Memorial Cup tournament the next day. Dylan gets to sit next to Alex on the flight, and he’s relieved not to be separated.

He thought the urge to touch would go away when he woke up this morning, but it hasn’t stopped yet. He wants to have his hands on Alex all the time. It doesn’t help that Alex still smells like him. Dylan definitely wasn’t imagining it yesterday: it’s still there, faint from the shower but undeniable. Every time Alex moves in his seat, Dylan gets a shot of his scent. Their scents, combined.

It makes him feel crazy. Alex already smelled so good, and now there’s even more there, different notes in his scent catching Dylan’s attention every time he’s near. Dylan wants to bury his nose in Alex’s skin and get all of it. Wants to wrap him up and carry him away.

They’re going to be rooming together for the tournament. Alex turns to him with a grin when they find out and says, “Come on, roomie,” and Dylan feels vaguely deranged.

He feels even more deranged that night when he’s lying awake not sleeping. He just keeps _hearing_ things: the slow hush of Alex’s breathing, the rustle of the sheets moving over his chest as it rises and falls. A few times he swears he can hear Alex’s heartbeat, but by that point midnight is far in the rear-view mirror, and it would be legit for him to be hallucinating at that point.

It’s not like Dylan’s not used to sleeping with a roommate. He does it all the time. It’s not even like Alex is louder than Darren or Petty or Ciri or any of the road roommates he’s had this year. Alex isn’t loud at _all_. He’s breathing in this nice steady almost-silent rhythm and Dylan tries to use it to lull himself to sleep but it only makes things worse.

Alex feels too far away. He’s maybe six feet away, on the other side of the little aisle between the beds, and Dylan _wants to be touching him._

He might be, like, actually crazy. He definitely feels like it, as the night goes on.

He falls asleep sometime around five a.m. At least, that’s the last time he remembers looking at the clock. But when his alarm goes off in the morning he feels like he hasn’t slept at all.

“Holy shit,” Alex says when Dylan sits up in bed. “Are you okay?”

Dylan’s too wiped out to be thinking anything over. “Um,” he says. “I’m not actually sure.”

Alex comes over and looks at him more closely. Dylan feels his closeness like the heat of a fire. “Are you sick?” he asks, putting his hand on Dylan’s forehead.

Dylan lets his head drop back without thinking. It’s shameless: his whole neck exposed, like he’s begging for something.

Alex hasn’t been this close for days. Not since two days ago, when they were on the couch after—after. Maybe he’ll get even closer. Maybe he’ll climb onto Dylan’s lap again, let him put his arms around him. Maybe he’ll slide his hand down, cup Dylan’s cheek, lean in…

He doesn’t. Alex isn’t a wolf, and he doesn’t know what the tipped-up chin means, and he takes his hand off Dylan’s forehead and steps away. “You don’t feel warm.”

Dylan doesn’t feel warm at all. He feels cold, now. “I think I just didn’t sleep well,” he says.

He gets through practice on pure grit. By the time they head back to the hotel for lunch, his feet are dragging. He can barely force down his chicken and salad. “Let’s…take a nap,” Alex says, looking at him with something Dylan can’t be bothered to read, and Dylan doesn’t object to being towed back to their room.

Alex turns to face him when they get there. “Do you want to shift?” he asks.

“Oh,” Dylan says. He nods. Yeah, that’s a good idea. That does seem restful.

He’s startled when Alex comes closer. For a second when Alex starts tugging at his hoodie, he thinks—but no, Alex is just helping him take his clothes off.

Dylan wants to protest that he doesn’t need it. But it feels good, having Alex do this for him, and he’s so clumsy at this point that he kind of does need the help. Alex’s hands brush up his torso, down his arms as he pulls off his layers. Down his legs.

It’s a good thing fatigue is still pulling on him, because he doesn’t have time to get hard before Alex is tugging off his boxers. “Now shift,” Alex says, and Dylan finds himself doing it before he can even think about it: shrinking down into his wolf form, smells suddenly blooming vividly around him.

Alex lays a hand on his fur and steers him toward the bed—toward Alex’s bed, which Dylan doesn’t even notice at first because he’s so focused on following Alex’s scent. He’s breathing it in deeply, hungry for it. Like he’s been on a diet and finally has a huge dinner in front of him.

Alex gets up on the bed and lifts the blankets for Dylan to join him. Dylan snuggles up to him right away, snuffling in closer to get more of that scent. So many notes he hadn’t noticed before. So much Alex.

He barely even notices himself getting sleepy. One moment he’s pushing in even closer, trying to get more of Alex’s skin against his fur, and the next he’s waking up, deeply rested, Alex still wrapped around him.

Alex is awake: Dylan can tell by his scent, by his breathing. He moves his nose against Alex’s neck a little—breathes in again—and Alex moves his hands in Dylan’s fur, scratching his back. Dylan never wants to move.

They wait until the last moment possible to get up for the game, and Dylan jerks off in the shower. He imagines what it would have been like to climb into that bed as a human: how maybe when they woke up Alex would have pressed his mouth to Dylan’s skin. How he would have pushed him onto his back and slid his cock into him, lighting Dylan up from the inside again. He comes with that in his head, and shunts it aside into the category of things he’s not going to think about too much. They have a game tonight.

The game is great. So much better than practice. Dylan feels energized the whole time, flying on his skates, and he’s laughing when he greets his parents and Matt afterward.

The next game is even better. Dylan gets a hat trick in the third, and he screams when he crashes into Alex. Then he nets another one before the game ends—four goals in one game.

The Sea Dogs score twice more right after Dylan’s goal but it doesn’t even matter. The Otters win it 12-5, and Dylan’s first star, with seven points and a tournament record.

He finds Alex right away again after—plants himself at his side, doesn’t have to work to keep them from being separated, as easy as tipping in that final goal. Can’t stop grinning and touching him, an arm over his shoulder, their shoulders bumping together. They go find Dylan’s family: “Seven points!” Matt roars, launching himself at Dylan, and his parents bury him in hugs. Dylan meets Alex’s eyes over his mom’s shoulder and isn’t sure when he’s been happier.

“No celebrating,” Coach warns them in the locker room, “you haven’t won anything yet,” so a bunch of the team piles into Dylan and Alex’s room instead of going out, and they watch the tape from tonight’s game. Dylan’s surprised they don’t get kicked out of the hotel for how much they’re screaming every time something good happens on the TV.

Alex makes them replay Dylan’s first goal a bunch of times. “Look how _good_ that is, holy _fuck._ ”

“He left his blocker side open,” Dylan says, ducking the praise but unable to keep the smile off his face.

Alex turns to him with this smile that’s just, it’s full of everything Dylan feels when they slam into each other in a celly. “It was fucking brilliant, don’t even front.”

He’s looking at him, not turning his eyes away, making him take the praise, and Dylan feels heat rise from under his collar.

It gets worse as the game goes on. Lots of people are saying lots of good things, but every time Alex says anything about Dylan it’s just—by the end of the tape it’s all Dylan can do not to put his mouth on him right here in front of the team.

He wouldn’t be allowed to do that, even if the rest of the team weren’t here. He bites the inside of his cheek and holds a pillow over his lap.

They all get sleepy after they finish watching the footage, and a bunch of them pile onto the one bed. Dylan ends up stretched out along the bed with his head on Alex’s chest. Alex has his arm around Dylan’s shoulders, fingers traveling idly up and down his arm, and Dylan’s whole body is tingling. Darren’s sacked out under the weight of three rookies and Taylor’s splayed out by Dylan’s thigh and Petty’s curled against his side, and everyone’s touching everyone and this team. Dylan loves this team. He never wants to leave it.

***

The magic fades a little in the next game, when they lose to Windsor 4-2. Erie outshoots them 35 to 19, but DiPietro shuts them down, and Timp can’t do anything to block Jeremiah Addison’s hat trick. 

It sucks. It happens, but it sucks. Dylan doesn’t feel like he was off his game or anything. But he didn’t score, and that means he’s letting the team down. Not the end of the world—they still have a chance to get through, if they beat the Sea Dogs on Friday. But Dylan feels churned up, thin-skinned at team dinner Thursday.

Alex leans against his shoulder when they’re done eating, and Dylan leans back gratefully. “We’re gonna win tomorrow,” Dylan says. He tries to put as much determination into his voice as possible. “We’re gonna slay them.”

“Damn straight we are,” Alex says. Dylan leaves their shoulders together for as long as he can.

They do win. It’s not a blowout like last time, but they win 6-3, and Dylan does score—off Alex’s pass—and Alex assists on three goals and is named second star.

The spirit in the locker room afterward is so different from after the last game. “One more!” Petty roars, and everyone cheers.

They have practice on Saturday morning, and then Dylan’s family takes him out for a fancy lunch. It feels weird to go without Alex. It feels weird _that_ it feels weird to go without Alex. They just haven’t really been apart all week. But it’s his family, and it’s just one lunch, and Dylan tries not to be too distracted while they eat. He’ll get to nap with Alex after anyway.

They’ve been doing that lately. It makes it easier for Dylan to fall asleep at night. He’s been in wolf form for it: safer, less weird, even if it’s not quite what he wants. What he wants is…well. He shoves that down. The wolf is safer.

The wolf doesn’t want Alex in the way that human-Dylan does, but it does still want him: wants him close, wants him touching him, wants him wrapped around him and not moving away. And Dylan gets that, even though they don’t have a game that day; they still nap when they meet up after lunch, Dylan shifting as soon as they get into the room, climbing onto the bed next to Alex and curling up against his chest and falling asleep with his scent in his nose.

One more game.

The tension is thick in the locker room the next day. Coach gives a speech, and then Dylan does, and he’s feeling a little shaky but it’s more excitement than nerves. “One more game,” Alex says to him as they’re waiting to head onto the ice, and it’s everything Dylan wants and everything he’s afraid of: one more game between them and the Memorial Cup; one more game with Alex.

“Let’s win,” Dylan says, “I want to win with you,” and Alex grips his arms and Dylan leans his chin on top of Alex’s head. It’s almost as close as he wants to be.

They hit the ice. Dylan scores less than a minute after Windsor’s first goal, tying it up off an assist from Darren and Alex. Then he assists on Fogey’s goal, and they’re ahead for about sixty seconds before Windsor ties it up again. Then TJ scores—ahead again—and Windsor ties it—and Windsor scores again—

Dylan shoots on the goal. He doesn’t score. Alex shoots on the goal; he doesn’t score. They all shoot on the goal.

No one scores.

Dylan doesn’t believe it when the end-of-game buzzer sounds. It’s World Juniors all over again: the other team celebrating, the world falling away before Dylan. His knees hit the ice.

It’s not quite World Juniors. Alex is there, pulling at his shoulder. He pulls Dylan up, and Dylan wraps his arms around him. He’s self-conscious as soon as he does: they don’t do this, hockey players don’t do this, don’t hug when they’ve lost. Hugging is a victory thing. But Dylan can’t bring himself to unwrap.

Alex lets him hug him. Hugs him back. Tugs at his arm. “Come on, man,” he says, and Dylan goes with him to the handshake line.

It’s not the ending Dylan wanted. They fly back to Erie the next day, to take care of their stuff before going home for the summer. During the tournament Dylan wasn’t thinking beyond it—but all of a sudden he’s leaving in three days.

It makes him nervy, and greedy. He doesn’t want to let Alex out of his sight. He doesn’t want to let him out of his touch—which he can’t exactly do, because, you know, normalcy. But he feels like if he looks away, lets his hand leave Alex’s skin, Alex will disappear before he’s ready for it.

“This was a good season,” Alex says when they’re on the plane back to Erie from the tournament, all the guys quiet after the loss.

Dylan has so many feelings about what Alex just said. Instinctive protest at the past tense. Disbelief that Alex would call it good, when they just lost one of their two biggest games of the year. But also: “Yeah,” he says. It really was.

In the statistical sense, it was good—it was great: Alex is at the top of the scoring lists for the OHL; he was the leading playoff scorer; he took home the Red Tilson Trophy. Dylan didn’t play enough games to top the charts, but he got 75 points in 35 games, and he was second in playoff scoring only to Alex. The team was at the head of the OHL, and they had more goals-for than the runner up by a margin of 22. It was a great season, infinitely better than Dylan could have imagined back in November when he was getting scratched from game after game with the Coyotes.

But it was a good season in other ways, too. Ways that are summed up by the press of Alex’s shoulder against his, the warmth and quiet that fills Dylan’s chest when they’re connected like this.

His flight to Toronto is in three days.

Those three days are filled up with locker clean-out and media wrap-up and putting their bedrooms at the Ackermans’ back the way they found them. That last bit takes Dylan a long time: every time he starts to put his shit into boxes and suitcases, he ends up just kind of…stopping. Not wanting to keep going.

The night before their flights, he puts down the bag he was filling and wanders into Alex’s room. Alex is doing up one of his last boxes. Dylan flops onto his bed. It’s weird seeing the room without Alex’s stuff crowded onto the desk, the dresser. Dylan doesn’t really have an excuse to be here, but—he doesn’t want to leave.

“You packed?” Alex asks.

Dylan snorts. “What do you think?”

Alex laughs. Dylan expects him to chirp him about how he’d better pack, they’re leaving in the morning, but instead Alex says, “You want to watch something?”

“Yes,” Dylan says gratefully.

Normally they’d go down to the TV room. But Alex has movies on his iPad, and they end up watching _Zootopia_ , lying against Alex’s pillows with the iPad on both their stomachs. Their arms are pressed together from shoulder to forearm, and Dylan barely moves an inch for the whole two hours.

He’s planning to get up to go to bed after. He really is. But Alex is touching him and he can’t bring himself to move away. This is going to be gone tomorrow. “We could watch something else,” he says, and Alex starts poking at the movie app, and Dylan lets his eyes close. Just for a minute.

The next thing he knows, the iPad is gone and Alex is tugging down the blankets. “Hm?” Dylan says sleepily.

“Hey,” Alex says, all soft. Dylan drags his eyes open all the way, and Alex is there, facing him, his head on the same pillow. “You can stay here if you want.”

“Mm,” Dylan says, closing his eyes again. He does want that, so badly. He’s so comfortable, already in his sweats, and he can’t imagine getting up and moving away. But Alex isn’t touching him anymore. Alex…Alex should touch him. 

Alex does. Alex’s hand lands on the side of his ribs, slide around to his lower back, and Dylan lets out all his breath in a rush. He rolls onto his stomach, and Alex snugs up against his side, his head on Dylan’s shoulder and his breath gusting over Dylan’s neck.

Dylan goes to sleep and dreams he’s floating, weightless in the warmest sea he’s ever felt.


	5. Chapter 5

The next day he says goodbye to Alex at the airport.

It’s not like Dylan will never see him again. He keeps reminding himself of that, as they sit in the back of the Ackermans’ car on the way to their flights. But it doesn’t help with the panic in his chest. Alex isn’t touching him—of course not, they’re sitting on opposite sides of the car, why would he be?—and Dylan feels like his skin is getting tighter and tighter, shrinking until it won’t fit onto his body anymore.

He’s not sure what he’ll do in the airport. He can’t let it be weird.

“Okay, Dylan, this is you,” Mr. Ackerman says, pulling up in front of one of the terminals.

“What?” he says.

“This is international,” Alex says. “Domestic is the next one.”

He sounds so calm about it. How can he be calm? Dylan is—

Dylan needs to be calm, too. This isn’t a big deal. They played together, they lived together, they slept together one time, and they’re good friends, obviously. They’ll stay good friends no matter what happens and he just needs to chill and make it through this goodbye.

He gets out of the car and hugs both of the Ackermans. He’s kind of crazy aware of Alex out of the corner of his eye the whole time, and then he’s done hugging the two of them and Alex is in front of him and this is it.

A bro hug is probably what he should go with. But he just hugged both the Ackermans. He can hug Alex, too, right? He meets Alex’s eye, and Alex grins, sort of self-consciously, and then Dylan steps forward and hugs him tight, tight, tight.

He knows as soon as the hug starts that he shouldn’t hold on for too long. But he doesn’t want to let go, either: he doesn’t know when the next time is that he’ll have Alex this close, touch him, smell him, feel connected with him like this. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever. The next time they meet, they won’t be teammates. They won’t be pack.

Dylan doesn’t want to let go.

He has to, though. He takes a deep breath of the scent behind Alex’s ear, and then he lets him go, and steps back.

His body is mad at him for it. There’s a fierce pulsing in his chest that’s saying Alex is pack, is his, that Dylan should keep holding onto him. But that’s not how it works in hockey. In life. Dylan closes his hand around the handle of his luggage and tells his body to chill the fuck out.

“Have a good flight,” Alex says, and Dylan maybe manages to say something back, and then they’re all leaving, heading back to the car and driving away, and Dylan is standing there alone.

***

It doesn’t take his mom very long to realize something is wrong.

Dylan’s trying not to seem like anything’s wrong. It’s just normal stuff, after all: you leave Juniors, you say goodbye to your teammates, you see them once or twice a year instead of every day. Everyone does it.

The first day, he’s just kind of tired, worn out from packing and the flight. His family throws him a welcome-home dinner, and he heads off to bed right after that. He ends up lying there for a long time, staring at the wall—but he’s in a place he hasn’t been in a while. Of course he’d have trouble sleeping.

He doesn’t have much of an appetite the next few days. He mostly sits around and watches playoff games. He doesn’t really care about any of the teams still in it at this point, but it’s something to do.

His mom says something a few days in. “I think Connor and Mitch are home,” she says. “Why don’t you see if they want to get together?”

“Yeah, we’re going to hang out soon,” Dylan says. There have been texts about it. It’ll probably happen sooner or later.

Matt and Ryan are home too, of course. They drag him out golfing a day or two later. Dylan’s pretty sure his mom’s behind that one, too. It does actually feel kind of good to be out in the sun, but it’s weird—he remembers liking golf a lot more in past years. This year he feels like he’s not quite there, like his body is playing without him.

“You look like you got some sun,” his mom says when they get back. She puts a hand on his shoulder, and Dylan immediately backs away, flinching from the touch.

He knows as soon as he did it that it was the wrong thing to do. She’s looking at him all worried. They’ve always been a touchy family, especially her and Dylan, and there’s no reason for him to shy away from it now. Except that as soon as she put her hand on him it was wrong.

He doesn’t know what to say. She’s still looking at him warily.

“Um,” he says finally. “Yeah, I think I got kind of sunburned. Sorry.”

She’s definitely shooting him looks at dinner that night. He’s braced for her to say something, but it doesn’t come until the next day, when he’s rinsing his breakfast dishes.

“You know,” she says, coming into the kitchen and leaning a hip against the counter, “I was just talking to Addy Shunskis the other day. She says Lauren is home from college.”

“Uh-huh,” he says.

“I thought it might be nice if you went over and said hi sometime,” she says.

The Shunskises are a wolf family they used to hang out with when Dylan was growing up. He has a lot of memories of wolf-wrestling with Lauren and Brody. He likes them a lot. But Lauren is an omega, and he’s pretty sure he knows why his mom is suggesting this.

“Sure,” he says to his mom. “I’ll think about it.”

He waits until she walks away. Then he goes up to his room and shuts the door and digs out his suitcase, the one he emptied when he got back from Erie. Except for the little side compartment, which holds a balled-up t-shirt that he pulls out now.

It’s his t-shirt. It’s not Alex’s. He didn’t do anything creepy like steal Alex’s laundry. But it’s the shirt Dylan wore on the last night, when he slept in Alex’s bed with Alex pressed along his side, and it smells like a combination of the two of them. When he emptied out his clothes to put into the wash, he couldn’t bear to include this one.

He presses it to his face and breathes in. It hits him somewhere low in his gut: a wave of everything he wants, bright and painful and so much more real than everything else in his life.

He ends up sitting on the floor by the closet, the shirt clutched in his fists. It’s pathetic, probably. He should get over whatever he thinks he’s holding onto and—and go visit Lauren Shunskis, or something. Find some nice omega, someone who’ll follow him to Arizona if he asks her to. That would be the smart thing to do.

But she won’t smell like this. She won’t touch him and make it so that the rest of the world falls away.

Dylan hasn’t texted Alex since coming home. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to play it cool. He doesn’t want to sound weird, and so—so he’ll just wait for Alex to reach out first. And Alex hasn’t yet. Dylan keeps looking at his phone, thinking he might have missed a notification, but nothing yet. But he’s probably really busy, catching up with family and friends, and it’s barely been a week. Dylan can wait.

He brings the shirt with him to bed that night, curls up with it held to his chest.

His mom knocks on his door the next morning when he’s still asleep. Dylan bolts up, startled. “Dylan, you have visitors,” she says, and he scrambles to hide the shirt before the door opens and Connor and Mitch bound in.

“Dude, don’t you love us anymore?” Mitch asks. “You’ve been home for a whole week.”

“Too busy winning a Cup,” Connor says, shaking his head sadly.

Dylan finds himself grinning. Connor’s always been good at this: highlighting other people’s achievements even when they pale in comparison to his. “Yeah, sorry all you have to show for the season is that Art Ross,” he says, and Connor gives him a noogie.

They play an impromptu game of ball hockey, and it feels good to be up and moving around in a way that’s more like what Dylan usually does. He even forgets to look at his phone till the middle of the afternoon.

He fishes it out when there’s a pause in play, Connor and Mitch trying to get the ball down from a tree, and startles when he sees Alex’s name.

Alex sent him a picture of the dark corner of a room, a jumble of fitness equipment. _my parents started keeping their workout stuff in my room,_ he sent, with a sad-face emoji.

Dylan reads it like twenty times, even though it’s a totally nothing text. But that doesn’t matter. It’s from Alex. _better use it,_ Dylan sends back. _time to finally get in shape_

_i know, wouldnt want to lose that edge i have over you,_ Alex sends, and Dylan’s about to text something snarky back when the ball arcs toward him and he instinctively reaches out to catch it.

“Yo, Stromer, stop texting your girlfriend and get back in the goal,” Mitch calls.

Dylan bites down on his lip, the silly grin falling off his face. He doesn't want Mitch to think—

But then, does it really matter? Mitch doesn’t know who he’s texting. “Sorry, was I making you guys jealous?” Dylan calls back.

They look unfazed. Which, legit: Dylan’s seen the girls Connor’s been posting selfies with on Instagram, and he doubts Mitch is having trouble getting any as the hero of Toronto. “Tell her her boyfriend sucks at playing goalie,” Connor says.

“Funny that you can’t score on me, then,” Dylan says, which is a lie. They’re all terrible as goalies. They take turns just so no one has to suffer too much. _sorry connor and mitch are being dicks,_ he texts to Alex. _gotta go stop their attempts to score on me_

Alex sends back a hockey stick emoji and a smiley and the face with a bandage on its head. It’s sadly accurate.

After that Dylan feels like he doesn’t have to hold back. It makes the days feel completely different, knowing he can text Alex and get texts back. Dylan feels a little bad about how it also keeps him…whatever this thing is, that he is: this thing where he thinks about Alex every time he jerks off and pulls that shirt out of his suitcase every few days to breathe in and get a hit right to the solar plexus. But no one needs to know about that.

He tries not to do the shirt thing too often. He doesn’t want the scent to fade.

His mom is definitely relieved at how much better he’s doing. “I’m glad you’re getting outside again,” she says one morning after he’s gone for a run, and she reaches over and ruffles his hair. Dylan makes himself push into the touch, even though he doesn’t really want it. It’s good for him, probably, even if it makes him feel all twisty and weird. Plus he doesn’t want her to worry.

He tells himself he’s not going to talk to Alex on the phone. Texting is enough; he doesn’t need more. But then he’s going to Arizona prospect camp for the third year in a row, and it’s still three days before but he can feel it churning in his stomach, all the dread from last fall. He’s lying in bed and he can’t sleep and it’s kind of late—Michigan is in the same time zone and Toronto, and it’s already eleven—but he punches the call button anyway, before he can wimp out.

Alex’s voice is bright and happy when he answers. “Hey! What’s up?”

“Nothing much,” Dylan says. It’s true: he doesn’t have a reason for calling. It’s not like Alex can promise him that camp will go okay this year. “Just, you know, it’s weird, not hearing you snoring through the wall.”

Alex sputters a laugh. “I do not snore.”

“Sure,” Dylan says, drawing the word out. “Would you really know, though?”

“I’ve had road roommates, asshole,” Alex says. “I was loud enough you could hear through a wall, pretty sure they’d tell me.”

“Maybe they were just afraid of you,” Dylan says. 

“Right,” Alex drawls. “I am a terror.”

“Definitely,” Dylan says. “But, uh, I don’t know. Yeah. Just headed to camp in a few days.”

He wasn’t going to bring that up. Or if he was, he wasn’t going to do it so awkwardly.

“Oh yeah,” Alex says. “I forgot yours was so early.”

“Yours is, what, mid-July?” Dylan says. Like he hasn’t already looked it up.

“Yeah, me and Darren,” Alex says. “I figure we’ll team up on Graham Knott, make him regret that Memorial Cup game.”

Dylan laughs, but something about that sounds—so nice. Having someone else from Erie with him in Phoenix. “Arizona should’ve drafted you,” he says, before he can think better of it.

There’s a little pause. “You’re just worried we’ll beat you,” Alex says finally.

“As if,” Dylan says automatically, though it’s hard to get the words out. Hard to act like this is a light thing.

He thinks about it later, after it’s late enough that Alex starts yawning into the phone and they finally hang up. What it would be like if Alex were headed to Phoenix with him later this week. He can feel the longing for it like a second heartbeat in his chest. But maybe it would be bad, too: maybe it would feed this weird obsession Dylan has, get it to the point where Alex noticed something. Maybe everything would fall apart.

Maybe Alex would just get a front-row seat to watch Dylan fail.

He closes his hand around his phone. He’s not going to fail. He had a two-plus-point-per-game average in Erie this year. That’s better even than Alex, who led the whole OHL in points. Dylan was the leading scorer of the Memorial Cup tournament. He knows how to play hockey, and he’ll know how to play it in Phoenix, too.

***

Dylan starts to sweat as soon as he steps out of the airport in Phoenix. The dry air wicks it away, but he can smell it: fear sweat. He has the scent of the desert in his nose, too, and it makes his heart race with remembered panic.

That was last year, though—last year and the year before. This year will be different.

He’s definitely stronger on the ice than he was last year at prospect camp. He worked on his skating this past year, with help from the Otters’ coaches, and it shows. He’s not sure how well he’s gelling with the team, though; they try him with a few wingers, and none of it feels right. Clayton Keller is good, and so is Christian Fischer, but it doesn’t quite click.

It would probably help if he stopped comparing it to what it felt like to play with the other Otters, Taylor and Petty and Fogey and Alex. Mostly Alex. That kind of chemistry doesn’t get built overnight. Dylan needs to give it time with these guys.

He does his best to speed things up by spending time with everyone off the ice. He’s bummed out that Chychrun isn’t here this year, but he’ll be at training camp, if Dylan makes it that far—and he will. No matter what is or isn’t clicking on the ice.

And maybe there’s hope with a new head coach, too. Tippett left last week, and Dylan can’t help but wonder if that will be good for him: he obviously wasn’t able to be what Tippett wanted him to be. Maybe when there’s a new guy Dylan will be able to get the hang of his system.

He leaves camp with an invitation to training camp in September and a feeling that he’s starting to know a few of the guys who are probably coming back in the fall. Still, when he gets back to Toronto and breathes the familiar air, it’s a relief. It never smells right in the desert. And he feels like he’s shrugging off clothing that’s a little too tight, setting aside the effort to be friends with his new potential teammates.

He confesses that last part to his mom later that night when she finds him sitting on the couch in the darkened living room. Dylan’s fiddling with his text app when she comes in, thinking about what to say to Alex about how camp went, and she sits down and puts a hand on his shoulder.

She used to do this a lot as a kid, come and touch him, and she’s scaled back as he’s gotten older. Right now, he both wants it and doesn’t. He doesn’t really know. He wants the comfort, but it also feels weird, and it makes his head hurt when he tries to think about it.

“You probably do need to give it more time,” she says when he tells her how he’s feeling about the team in Arizona. “There are a lot of new people at prospect camp, right? And you’re older than you were when you went to Erie.”

Dylan doesn’t see what that has to do with it. But: “Wolves are better at breaking old connections and forming new ones when we’re young,” she says. “As we get older, it takes longer to get to that level of connection with a new group of people. But the connections can get deeper than they could when we were young. It’s a trade-off.”

“Oh,” Dylan says, so relieved that he can hardly speak. He hadn’t known that about wolves and getting older. So it’s not that he won’t be able to bond with this new team like he did in Erie; it’s just that it will take longer.

“They probably smell wrong to you, don’t they?” his mom asks.

“ _Yes,_ ” Dylan says. They all smell wrong. And he keeps looking around for familiar scents, one in particular, and not finding it. It’s maddening.

“They’ll get into your nose,” she says. “Give it time.”

He’s so happy to hear this that he lets her tip his head onto her shoulder. It still feels weird, but he breathes through it. He’s going to get comfortable with the Coyotes—as comfortable as he was in Erie, or more so, hard as it is to imagine that. And he pushes down the tiny part of him that thinks of that as a betrayal.

***

Dylan doesn’t read his own press. But he’s not quite as good at not reading Alex’s.

Part of it’s just name-hunger. Dylan wants to bring up Alex all the time, to his family, to the press, to Connor and Mitch. He wants to hear Alex’s name badly enough that he doesn’t say it ever, because he knows he wouldn’t be able to make it come out normally. But anytime someone else brings it up, it’s all he can do not to point like a hunting dog.

“Brinksy’s going to make a splash at camp, huh?” Mitch says when they meet up in the city in the first week of July.

“Yeah, I guess,” Dylan says, bracing himself to play it cool. He doesn’t mention the five articles he read last night about the expectations for Alex in Chicago. “I mean, he had a pretty great year.”

He’s hoping Mitch will start talking about Alex’s year, and Dylan will get to say all the stats that are on the tip of his tongue, but Mitch starts talking about the Leafs instead, about how weird it is to be in Toronto without the other guys around now, and Dylan has to try hard not to be jealous. Mitch has a team he feels a part of, one he’ll get to stick with next year. ButDylan will have that, too, in Arizona—he just has to give it time.

He texts Alex instead of talking about him to other people. He would feel bad about doing that too much, too, but Alex texts him back just as much.

_CAMP,_ Alex sends him the night before he leaves.

_still going to be the shortest one?_ Dylan asks.

_nooo they found a five year old to play dman, i think,_ Alex sends back, and Dylan laughs out loud. And then curls up around his phone because holy _fuck_ does he want Alex to be here.

Dylan doesn’t know when he’ll see him again in person. Probably sometime in the fall, if he and Alex both end up on their NHL teams. If Alex goes back to Erie—Dylan doesn’t know. It’s a little panic-inducing, not knowing, like being underwater and not knowing when he’ll get to draw his next breath. He thinks if he could just know, even if it’s a long time from now, he could make it. He could brace himself and get through.

He might watch the hockey news with a little too much attention while Alex is at camp. There’s some footage of Alex making nice moves in a scrimmage, but the coverage is disappointingly lukewarm. “Alex DeBrincat doesn’t quite stand out,” one headline says, and Dylan wants to throw his phone.

He tries not to act like he already read all the news when he talks to Alex. They’ve been talking on the phone every few days recently, and it’s—it’s keeping Dylan going, is what it is.

“I feel like they should be, like, high-fiving themselves that they drafted you,” Dylan says. “None of this ‘not standing out’ bullshit.” Okay, so he tried a _little_ bit to seem like he hadn’t read the news.

“Hey,” Alex says, “as long as they let me play in the fall, I don’t care what they say about me now.”

He sounds so chill about it. Dylan doesn’t know how he can be so chill. He wants to ask if Alex read any press about Dylan, and what it said—but he also doesn’t quite want to know.

There’s still so much summer left, somehow. Dylan remembers summers when he was a kid, and how much he loved the freedom, and it’s amazing how grating it is in contrast now. Summer doesn’t have any of the things he loves in it now. Not hockey, and not—yeah. Not anything.

He fills the time: he works out, he books ice time, he lurks on the wolf chat and tries not to call attention to himself. There’s a bunch of excitement on it in July, Edmonton trying to trade Taylor Hall and getting slammed with the CBA clause against separating bondmates. _wtf were they thinking? they KNO the rules,_ Kane says. Crosby has a lot to say about it, with slightly better spelling. Kesler changes the name of the group to No Movement Claws.

Dylan fills some of his time with Connor, golfing and hanging out in the city; they also hang out with Mitch once they track him down. “Yeah, I was traveling,” Mitch says when they get together, and sure enough, he smells like—fuck. He smells like Arizona.

“Where?” Dylan asks, more alarm in his voice that he intended. He doesn’t even know why he’s alarmed.

“Just visiting friends,” Mitch says, and Dylan get a closer sniff and realizes he smells like a wolf.

Not just any wolf. Like an alpha, with that distinctive scent Dylan caught at World Juniors a year and a half ago. Mitch was in Arizona visiting Auston Matthews.

They’re golfing at the time, and Dylan just kind of stops with a club in his hand. It’s crazy that that never even occurred to him as a possibility. Like, obviously he knew people could visit each other—he knows about planes by now, he’s pretty sure—but it didn’t occur to him that he could do it without it seeming weird.

But if Mitch is going to hang out with his teammate in the middle of the summer—a teammate he’ll see in the fall, even, unlike Dylan—then it must be okay for Dylan to see Alex.

Dylan could invite Alex here. He thinks about what it would be like, to have Alex around as he goes about his normal life, and he gets this giddy rush that makes him need to hide his face so that Connor and Mitch don’t see him grinning like an idiot.

He second-guesses himself like twelve times before he finally sends a text later that night. _hey,_ he sends after typing the whole thing out in his notes app so that Alex wouldn’t see him typing and hitting backspace forever. _not sure how busy you are for the rest of the summer but you could come hang in toronto if you wanted to_

He hits send, and then he gets up and walks away from his phone so he’s not sitting there waiting for a response. But ten seconds later he caves and goes back and looks at his phone.

There’s already a message there. _that would be awesome! when were you thinking?_

Dylan lets out a huge breath. He can feel himself smiling. He wasn’t thinking anything, exactly—or rather, he wasn’t thinking beyond getting up the nerve to ask in the first place. _whenever, i dont leave for az til sept,_ he sends back. Then, feeling daring: _come for a week or sth_

_yeah, let me talk to my parents,_ Alex says, and, oh. Dylan should probably do that.

He brings it up the next day when his mom gets home from work. “Hey,” he says, aiming for casual. “Would it be okay if my friend Alex came to stay?”

His mom brightens in a way that is probably helpful to his cause but also makes him feel really exposed. “Alex DeBrincat?” she says. “Of course. He’s such a nice boy.”

“Right,” Dylan says. “I mean, he still has to ask his parents, so, yeah. We’ll see.”

“Well, whenever he wants to come, we’ll be happy to have him,” she says.

Alex texts him later that night: _parents on board._ They pick a week in late August. Dylan doesn’t fall asleep for ages, scrolling back up and reading the text chain to make sure it’s still true.

It changes everything, having that to look forward to. Dylan had been thinking that he might never get that kind of time with Alex again, that he might never see him for more than a few hours for dinner or drinks when their teams played each other. Now Alex is going to be here for an entire week. It’s like the world has opened up again.

He tries to play it cool the day Alex is coming. He feels like he had like five espresso shots: every part of him wants to jitter and bounce. He thinks he tamps it down pretty well, but Ryan still says, “Man, what’s gotten into this kid?” while cuffing him around the head.

“He’s excited about his OHL boyfriend coming,” Matty says.

“Shut the fuck up,” Dylan says, and he thinks he manages to put enough of a lazy tone that they don’t think they’re getting close to the truth. Not that it’s true at all. Alex isn’t his boyfriend.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to expose your love,” Matt says anyway, because he is a dick.

The day lasts approximately forty-nine thousand hours and then it’s _finally_ time to go to the airport. “You sure you don’t want me to drive you?” his dad asks.

“No, I got it,” Dylan says, bouncing on his heels while he watches the clock. He can probably leave now, right? Yeah, he could leave now. There might be traffic.

He ends up circling for like forty-five minutes until Alex finally texts, and then Dylan pulls up and there he is. There’s Alex, here and in-person, real for the first time in three months.

It’s like the whole world shifts. Like the color spectrum of the world changes and everything slows down and Dylan doesn’t even know how he manages to navigate the car to the curb, he’s so focused on the way Alex’s face is lighting up as he spots him.

Dylan parks the car at the curb. He’s pretty sure you’re not supposed to actually turn the engine off here, but fuck it, they can ticket him if they want. He is getting the fuck out of the car and he’s not going to be paying attention to anything except Alex.

Alex is standing there with a duffel and a Blackhawks t-shirt and a huge smile and Dylan can smell him already and he’s only a few steps away and then Dylan’s got his arms around him.

Alex is here, in his arms. Dylan lets out a great breath from the bottom of his lungs like he’s expelling everything from the last three months. When he breathes in again, it’s all Alex: that rich nutty woodsy scent, flashing through Dylan’s body and transforming every cell. He forgot how strong that scent was. It knocks the diluted scent from that t-shirt from May right out of the park. He just wants to stand here and breathe it forever.

It’s probably really socially inappropriate how long he holds onto Alex. But he’s a wolf; weird touch stuff can always be written off to that. And Alex is holding onto him, too.

“Man, it’s good to see you,” Alex says when they finally separate, Dylan making himself take the socially mandated step back.

“Yeah,” Dylan says, though it feels like a lie, how much of an understatement it is. It’s not just good to see Alex; it’s necessary, like food when you’re hungry or water when you’re thirsty or air when you’ve been under water. Dylan feels like his body is a limb that’s been asleep, and now that Alex is here the blood is rushing back in.

They talk the whole trip back to Dylan’s house, even though they’ve been texting and talking on the phone and it’s not like they have a lot to catch up on. But Dylan is full of energy, and it must be contagious because Alex is the same, laughing at shit that wouldn’t even be funny to anyone else. A week, Dylan keeps thinking; they have a whole week. It feels like this crazy unimaginable thing.

They get back to Dylan’s house in time for dinner, and Dylan kind of feels like he should tamp it down in front of his family, but he can’t help it. He keeps looking over at Alex, and Alex keeps _being there,_ in person, not in a text bubble or a voice on the phone, but actually here as a real person who Dylan can smell and see and touch.

“Well, here’s the Dylan we’ve been missing,” his dad says halfway through dinner, when Dylan and Alex have been laughing at a story about the Raddyshes water-skiing. “What?” he says when Dylan’s mom elbows him.

“Have you been boring without me?” Alex asks, his cheeks dimpling.

“F—screw you, I am always interesting,” Dylan says.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you tell a bigger lie,” Ryan says, and Dylan flings mashed potatoes at him and gets yelled at for having bad table manners in front of his guest.

“Like Alex hasn’t seen Dylan do worse,” Matt says, which, yes, true.

Alex gives good parent. He compliments the cooking, and offers to do the dishes after dinner, which makes both Dylan’s parents fall all over themselves thanking him. “Suck up,” Dylan mutters at him when Alex gets told to go settle in instead.

Alex beams at him. “So show me this room of yours.”

Dylan shouldn’t feel nervous about this. Alex saw his room at the Ackermans’ a million times. But this is his childhood room, a room filled with the random pieces of his life that haven’t been thrown out since he acquired them in, like, first grade or whatever. This is a whole different level.

And there’s another piece of it, one Dylan doesn’t realize is there until he shows Alex in and shuts the door behind them. As soon as that door is shut, it becomes theoretically possible to kiss him.

Dylan’s not going to. Obviously. But he could: could walk up to Alex and kiss the breath out of him and push him down onto the bed. It tangles up his thoughts.

He hovers by the door and tries to chill while Alex pokes around his room. “Dude, a One Direction CD?” Alex says, fishing it off his bookshelf with a grin.

Of course he’d find the single most embarrassing item in the room. “Oh. Ryan got that as a gag gift for me last Christmas.”

“And yet it’s August.” Alex smirks and tilts his head at the CD cover. “It’s okay. They are kind of cute.”

“That’s not why I—” Dylan feels a flush rising up his neck. “I was barely even _here_ for Christmas, I forgot all about—”

Alex is laughing at him. “So is this _your_ bed?” he asks, toeing the air mattress on the floor that Dylan and his mom set up earlier in the day.

“You’re such a brat,” Dylan says.

“I can’t believe it took you three years of knowing me to realize that,” Alex says. He lies down on the air mattress and stretches out. “Nah, this is good. Not too short for me.”

Dylan’s supposed to joke back, but he’s paralyzed by the sudden sight of Alex stretched out at his feet. “Uh, yeah, we had to search every store for one long enough,” he says after way too much of a pause.

Alex doesn’t seem to notice, or at any rate he doesn’t say anything about it. “So what do you do for fun around here?” he asks, sitting up on the air mattress.

They end up having a Chel tournament with Ryan and Matt. There’s not quite enough space on the couch in the TV room, so they squeeze in, Alex under Dylan’s arm when it’s his turn to play because—well, because that’s the best way to fit together. Dylan lets his forearm rest on Alex’s shoulder a little and resists the urge to trail his fingers along his bicep.

Alex and Dylan win the tournament. Obviously.

They go up to bed, and Dylan’s palms are sweating a little, even though there’s no reason for it. Nothing’s gonna happen. Alex will be on the floor, a few feet away from Dylan’s bed, and they’ll go to sleep. No reason to worry about anything.

They brush their teeth, and go back into Dylan’s room, and Alex throws himself onto the air mattress. And sinks slowly to the floor.

“Uh-oh,” Alex says.

“Huh,” Dylan says. His heart is pounding in his ears. “It must have sprung a leak or something.”

“Either that or I’ve been working out too much this summer,” Alex says.

They kind of poke at the mattress a little, seeing if they can find the broken spot, and then Dylan says, “Yeah, so there’s a couch downstairs.”

“I guess it’ll have to be that,” Alex says. “This thing’s super dead.”

“Or,” Dylan says, tongue thick in his mouth. “Or you could just share my bed.”

Alex cocks his head, considering. “Not like we haven’t done it before.”

Dylan keeps bumping into things as he gets ready for bed. He’s too aware of Alex to have any sense of his own body. Then they finally crawl into bed, and Alex is right there, right there, all his skin and heat and scent lying next to Dylan under the blanket.

“Big spoon or little?” Alex says.

Dylan swallows. He’s pretty sure there’s a right answer here, and it’s not the one he wants to give. But he imagines lying awake, knowing he could have had the other one, and—“Is it weird if I say little?”

Alex grins at him. “Literally why I asked, dude,” he says, and manhandles Dylan onto his side. His chest presses up behind Dylan, and his breath is hot on Dylan’s neck, and he wraps an arm around Dylan’s waist.

Dylan feels so warm. So contained. Like he’s been out in the cold for months and he’s finally back in the place he belongs.

He doesn’t grab Alex’s hand and lace their fingers together. But he thinks about it.

“Night,” Alex says, his lips moving a little against the back of Dylan’s neck, and Dylan shivers and closes his eyes and lets himself sink into sleep.

***

It’s maybe the best week of Dylan’s life. Well—no, the week where they won the Cup was probably the best week, but this is a close second.

Alex is just there, every moment. He’s Dylan’s guest, so they spend all their time together. They have to work out a lot to get ready for their training camps, so they do that most mornings, going for runs and using the weights in Dylan’s garage. Then in the afternoons they mostly go into the city. Alex has never been around Toronto as a tourist, so Dylan shows him the sights. Dylan didn’t realize how fun his city was until he started going around it with Alex.

They meet up with Connor and Mitch a couple of times. Connor hasn’t seen Alex in like two years. Dylan doesn’t even mind having them around; Alex is still there, which is what counts.

Dylan hopes he isn’t being too obvious when they’re all together. He probably is, though: he can feel it in his face, how much he’s been smiling. He just can’t help it. Everything feels completely different.

It’s a struggle not to touch Alex too much, or in the wrong ways. Dylan’s definitely pushing the envelope a little, letting their knees brush together when they’re eating lunch and shoulder-checking him while they’re walking around the city. But Alex knows he’s a wolf; he knows how much Dylan likes touch. He probably doesn’t guess that there’s this whole sea of other things Dylan would like to be doing.

Dylan’s nervous the second night when they go up to bed. Neither of them has said or done anything about the air mattress during the day. Dylan’s worried Alex is going to want to set something up, though: maybe blankets on the floor or the couch cushions or whatever. But they change into sleeping clothes and brush their teeth and then Alex just climbs into bed with him.

It’s like a dream. Six nights of Alex in his bed with him, pressed warm against him, snugged up against his chest or behind his back. Dylan cannot actually believe it’s even happening.

His mom says something the second day, when Alex is out of the room. “That air mattress is looking a little flat,” she says. “Make sure you reinflate it tonight. You don’t want Alex to be uncomfortable.”

“Oh,” Dylan says. “Yeah. I will.”

He could tell her—it’s not that weird that the two of them are sharing a bed, when the air mattress is broken. He’s not even sure she can’t smell it on him. But he doesn’t say anything, and they keep not talking about it and leaving the air mattress on the floor.

He and Matt and Ryan have ice time booked a couple times that week. Alex brought his skates, and he comes along, borrowing a stick and some spare pads Matt grew out of. It’s probably the best part of the week, second only to climbing into bed together every night: having Alex back on the ice with him. Dylan’s been skating a bunch this summer, working on his edges, but as soon as he steps onto the rink with Alex he remembers how breathlessly good this used to be. They pass the puck back and forth a bunch, fast like lightning, and score on the empty goal and whoop and hit the boards.

“You guys know there’s no one in that net, right?” Ryan says.

“Questioning our skills?” Dylan says. “You wanna take us on?”

They end up playing two-on-two, Ryan and Matt against Dylan and Alex. It’s maybe a little unfair—Dylan and Alex have a much higher average draft number, and also have actually played on a team together before—but fuck it. Dylan and Alex wipe the floor with them and it feels awesome.

“Fuck you guys. They should have drafted you together,” Matt says when Dylan and Alex score their dozenth goal and Ryan is starting to look a little pinched in the face.

“Yeah, too bad,” Dylan says, skating a loop so that no one has to see what his face does in response to that.

They spend their last full day together in downtown Toronto, going to High Park and eating ice cream and visiting the zoo. Dylan takes a selfie of them in front of the big maple leaf and posts it to Instagram: _working on converting this guy_.

It only takes a few minutes before his texts start blowing up. _u guys are hanging out in toronto and you didnt invite us???_ Fogey sends to the Otter alum text.

_sorry, cool kids only,_ Dylan sends back.

_yeah, shouldv been nicer to us last year,_ Alex sends.

“They’re gonna destroy us for this,” Dylan says.

“Whatever, their loss,” Alex says, bumping his shoulder and laughing at Dylan when it makes him get ice cream on his chin. Dylan wipes his chin and ducks his head to hide how silly his grin is getting.

He doesn’t want it to end. He hasn’t come around to believing that it _is_ going to end, even when it’s their last night and he’s setting his alarm to drive Alex to the airport tomorrow morning. This is too good. It can’t just end like that.

They end up talking for a while after they get into bed, random nothing conversation about shit they did this week and their training regimes going forward. “It’s gonna be a while before we see each other again,” Dylan says, even though he wasn’t planning to.

“Not that long,” Alex says. “Chicago plays Arizona in October.”

“Yeah, but,” Dylan says, then changes course. “I mean, yeah. Yeah, that’s true.”

Alex kicks his ankle a little. “Don’t think I’ll make the team?”

That’s not what Dylan meant at all. He thinks Alex will definitely make the team. As for Dylan—well, he probably will, too; he knows that. It’s just that after last year, it’s hard to imagine. Being on the team, knowing he’ll play every game. “Nah. I’ll see you there,” he says.

It’s still a long time from now. Chicago comes to Arizona on October 21—Dylan’s already looked it up—and Dylan will get to play against Alex on the ice, maybe see him before or after. Maybe get him to spend the night, depending on the Hawks’ travel schedule. And then Alex will be gone again, and they won’t play each other again until December.

Dylan doesn’t know how he’s supposed to live like that.

“You think it’ll be weird to play against each other instead of on the same line?” Alex says.

“Yes,” Dylan says, a little too fervently. He hasn’t played against Alex since World Juniors a year and a half ago. He has a feeling it will be harder now.

“I guess…we probably won’t get the chance to play on the same team again,” Alex says.

He says it like maybe it’s the first time he’s thinking about it. It’s not the first time Dylan’s thought about it. He’s thought through the options: Juniors is off the table now, for Dylan at least. And they’re from different countries, so no international play even if Dylan somehow made Team Canada. Maybe—maybe the All-Star Game. If they both ever make it. And if the teams are organized by divisions again, not even then.

His chest aches. Alex is so close, live and real. It’s impossible to believe that won’t be true twenty-four hours from now. Dylan wants to reach out and touch him. Wants to put his hand under Alex’s shirt and touch his skin, all of it. Wants to slide his mouth over Alex’s and taste his breath. Wants so badly he feels like he’s going to strain something inside of him, wanting.

He closes his eyes, and when he opens them, Alex is looking at him across the pillow.

“You’re gonna play,” Alex says, quiet and filled with conviction. “You’re too good not to play.”

Dylan stares at him; that’s not even the thing he’s most worried about right now, but also: “What if I don’t?”

“You will,” Alex says. His mouth quirks. “But if you don’t, you know where to call me.”

He’s so good. Dylan doesn’t know how he’s going to manage not to kiss him.

Alex lays a hand on Dylan’s head, on the back of his scalp, and for a second Dylan thinks—but no. “Go to sleep,” Alex whispers, and Dylan tucks his head in against Alex’s and falls asleep like that, Alex’s hand warm in his hair.

***

He doesn’t know how he says goodbye to Alex at the airport the next day. It’s worse than last time, in May, because that time he could lie to himself about how bad it would be. This time he _knows_ it’s going to be bad.

He tries to tell himself, with Alex in his arms at the curb, that they can do this again. They’ll have more weeks like this. It won’t be till next summer, but that’s not so far from now. Ten months is a totally normal time to go without seeing your former teammate.

Alex pulls out of the hug, and Dylan needs him to leave now—needs him to leave before his face does whatever it’s going to do. “Well,” Alex says, “see you,” and then he’s waving awkwardly, and turning to go into the terminal.

Dylan balls his hands into fists. _Don’t run after him don’t run after him don’t run after him._

What would he even say, if he did?

The drive back feels way longer than the drive to the airport. Dylan feels sick to his stomach by the time he gets home. He decides to go lie down for a little bit; at least his sheets will still smell like the two of them.

But when he gets to his room his bed has been stripped.

Dylan stands in the doorway and stares. But—it can’t—he wasn’t—

“Did you wash my sheets?” he says to his mom, barging into the kitchen.

“I had Matt strip the rooms,” she says, sipping a cup of coffee. “Why?”

Dylan feels like she can see right through him, to his core, the panicked part of him that’s nothing but devastated want. What reason could he have for wanting the sheets he and Alex were sleeping on for the past week? Why would he care about that?

“Just wondering,” he says. It’s fine. It’ll have to be fine. The scent would have faded eventually anyway.

“I haven’t washed them yet,” she says, and now she’s looking at him a little too hard. “If there’s something you—”

“No, no,” he says, and goes out of the kitchen, and then doubles back by a different route to get to the laundry room.

There’s a pile of sheets in a basket on the floor. Dylan digs through it until he finds a pillowcase, and yes. This is it: the scent he was counting on being able to curl up in. The scent of Alex sleepy and warm and so close that Dylan can let himself pretend things that aren’t true.

He takes the pillowcase. He ends up huddled on his bare mattress, breathing in its scent and thinking: October. He just has to make it to October.


	6. Chapter 6

Dylan’s prepared this time for how empty things feel without Alex. He pushes himself hard at his training, getting ready for camp, and he heads out to Arizona in late September feeling—well, not confident, exactly. Hopeful. He’ll stick with hopeful.

Rich Tocchet, the new head coach, welcomes everyone to camp and makes it clear he’ll be making changes slowly, assessing the current system before moving toward anything else. But Dylan doubts it’ll be that smooth. Having a new head coach always shakes things up.

It makes him a little glad, honestly. Not just because Tippett’s system clearly wasn’t working for him, though, that too—but also because maybe it means everyone will be off-balance, not just Dylan. He’s probably a terrible person.

“I mean, maybe a tiny bit. But I get it,” Alex says when Dylan calls him. They’re FaceTiming, and Dylan loves it, because he can stare at Alex’s face all he wants and have it be normal, and also sometimes Alex looks at the camera and Dylan can feel like they’re making eye contact. “Of course you want them all to be in the same shitty situation.”

“You wouldn’t want that,” Dylan says.

“Sure I would,” Alex says. “It’s not like you’re wishing for them all to fall and break their legs.”

“Not yet,” Dylan says, and Alex laughs. He looks good, happy—his camp is going well, he says. Dylan hopes it is. The Blackhawks should realize how lucky they got, with their second-round pick.

It seems like maybe they do. Alex calls him after they both make the preseason rosters. “So looks like we’ll be facing off in October after all,” he says.

“I mean, if we stay up,” Dylan says.

“No, I mean, it looks like I will,” Alex says. And then, almost shyly, “I got my letter.”

“Your what?” Dylan says, not getting it, and then: “Your housing letter? Holy _shit,_ Alex!”

Dylan is kind of jumping up and down on his hotel bed, but he can still see the phone, where Alex is laughing. “Yeah, it was earlier than I expected.”

His cheeks are pink. He looks so happy. He’s gonna get a place to live in Chicago that’s his very own, and Dylan is so happy for him but also his entire gut contracts with the knowledge that that place won’t be Dylan’s, too. That there will never be a place that belongs to both of them. “You’ll have to show me around the awesome condo you’re gonna get sometime.”

“I’ll probably stick with renting for now,” Alex says, running a hand over his face. He’s still grinning.

“Still, though.” Dylan settles back onto the bed. “This means they’re really keeping you. That’s awesome.”

“Yeah.” Alex doesn’t bring up Dylan’s situation. Dylan can feel the space when he could, and he’s so, so grateful that Alex doesn’t. It would be…that’s not what this is about. “But no. You can definitely come see. When you’re here with the team.”

“It’s a plan,” Dylan says.

Dylan used to think he’d have a place in Arizona of his own by now. He thought he’d get the letter in his second year, if not his first. But now he wouldn’t bet on it happening anytime soon at all.

It sucks, and not just because it means the team’s unsure of him. Dylan hates hotel rooms. There’s the built-up smells of years of other people who’ve slept there, and then there’s the thing where he goes home at the end of the day and knows that he won’t have anyone else in his living space. He doesn’t want to have to live like that for as long as he did last year. But he can’t commit to anything, alone or with roommates, when he doesn’t know if the team will keep him.

The wolf thing makes it dicey, too. Everyone on the team’s been really cool about it, but there’s cool with it, and then there’s wanting it in your house where you sleep, and Dylan doesn’t want to mistake the former for the latter. Which means asking the guys with spare rooms is probably out.

Fortunately, Jakob comes up to him at their last practice before the first preseason road trip and offers. “Seriously?” Dylan says. “That would be really cool.”

“Yeah, you didn’t suck too much as a road roommate last year, I figure I can handle it,” Jakob says, grinning at him.

It’s better, having a place that feels like an actual home to come back to. It’s not—well. It’s not some of the things that it could be. But it’s better. And Chick is cool—lets Dylan do whatever without bugging him.

Not that Dylan is doing a lot of whatever. He’s mostly sleeping and going to practice and trying to do whatever he can to improve his game. He knows he might not get a lot of chances to prove himself here. This is when it counts most: when Tocchet is still testing the chemistry of the lines. Dylan has to prove that one of those combinations is better with him on it.

The first preseason game against the Ducks goes pretty well. He assists on Christian Fischer’s goal in the first: nothing spectacular, but solid. Christian’s someone he could make something work with, Dylan thinks, if they spend some more time together on the ice and learn each other’s styles more. And Perlini—Dylan likes the feel of skating with him. Dylan gets a goal off his assist in their second game, and he’s so relieved that he managed to convert something.

“So you’re feeling more settled there this season?” his mom asks when they talk after the second game.

“Sure,” Dylan says. He’s definitely starting to know everyone a little better than he did. He’s kind of distracted, watching the clock: he didn’t get to talk to Alex last night, when they both had a game, and he’s hoping he’ll be able to talk to him before he goes to bed.

He’s trying to ration himself to every two days. Even that seems like it’s way more often than it should be—Dylan’s sure Alex doesn’t talk to any of his other former teammates every other day. (Dylan hopes Alex doesn’t talk to any of his other former teammates every other day. But that’s a separate, if related, problem.) But when Dylan’s sitting on the bus, on the plane, in the locker room at the rink, aching for Alex to be there, waiting two days between calls feels almost impossible.

It’s just because he’s not at home here yet. Once Dylan settles in more, he’ll lower it to every three or four days. Maybe once a week. He’ll be able to handle that then.

Dylan gets a single assist in the last two preseason games. Three points in four games: not bad.

He makes the lineup for the opening game, and he’s so relieved. He doesn’t score, but, okay, it’s only one game. He doesn’t score in the second game, either, but he thinks he plays okay, and he’s not expecting it when he’s called into Chayka’s office the morning before they fly to Vegas.

“I’m sorry,” Chayka says, and, “We think you have a lot to offer this team in the future,” and the upshot is that they’re sending Dylan to the AHL.

The AHL. Dylan never even thought about the AHL growing up. His expectations management, when he was drafted, was to tell himself that maybe he’d play in Juniors for another year after the draft. Maybe he wouldn’t be a star on his NHL team right way. Maybe it would take a little time: third line, second line, working himself up. He never thought they would send him down to the A.

For development, Chayka said. Dylan tries to sell himself on that as he goes back to Jakob’s to pack. They’re sending him to Tucson to get better, and then they’ll bring him back up, and he’ll be in the NHL like he always thought he would.

Right.

Tucson is a two-hour drive away. Dylan looks up the Roadrunners’ schedule while he packs. They do have a game on October 21, when the Blackhawks are coming to Arizona. It’s against the Chicago Wolves. In Chicago.

His phone starts chiming with a FaceTime request. It’s Alex; either the news just broke, or it’s a coincidence, and Dylan will have to tell him. That they won’t see each other in October after all, because Dylan isn’t good enough to play with his team.

He lets the call go to voicemail.

***

Life doesn’t stop when Dylan goes to Tucson. He still has to do stuff. He still has to skate, even though he’s not good enough at it; he still has to train and try to do well.

It’s a lot easier to do well in the AHL. Dylan has that feeling again, the one where he’s one of the best people on the team. It’s a terrible feeling, here: like maybe he’s finally found his level. Like second-best is where he belongs.

He hates it, and he kind of hates himself for how much he hates it. Lots of guys play in the AHL and do just fine—his teammates are all good guys, good players, there’s nothing wrong with their lives. But Dylan feels like he’s running on sand.

He doesn’t avoid Alex. But he feels like he doesn’t have the right to call him whenever he wants, either. Dylan’s not—he isn’t in Alex’s league. Literally.

They end up talking maybe once a week or so, which was where Dylan was hoping to get in the first place. So…that’s good. It doesn’t make Dylan want to talk to him any less: he feels hungry for him all the time, stretched out like a rubber band across the number of days it’s been since he talked to Alex, since he’ll talk to him again. But he’s doing it. He can handle it.

Alex texts him during the game on October 21. Dylan doesn’t see it till after, when he’s changing, and his heart leaps at the name on the screen. _man, this Arizona team sucks,_ Alex texts. _seems like they could use a good center._

_lmk if you find one,_ Dylan texts back.

He feels blah about it as soon as he sends it. He tries not to sound as pathetic as he is in front of Alex. He kind of wishes he could just not talk to him right now, not talk to anyone, hide away until he starts being successful again—but he doesn’t have the willpower to cut himself off from Alex like that. And who even knows how long it would take.

At least he’s doing okay on the Roadrunners. It would be the worst if he couldn’t even play in the AHL. It helps that he’s never been good at _not_ putting everything he has into his game. And everything he has might not be good enough for the NHL, but it’s good by AHL standards: he’s scoring at a point-per-game rate, and he goes on a seven-game point streak in November.

Evidently it’s enough, because in late November, Steve Sullivan calls Dylan into his office and tells him he’s being sent back to Phoenix.

“See, I knew they’d wise up,” Alex says when Dylan calls him, because of course he calls him right away. Dylan’s earned this call.

“I mean, we’ll see,” Dylan says.

“Don’t be dumb. They’re lucky to have you,” Alex says. “Looks like I’ll see you in December.”

Dylan wishes he hadn’t said that. It feels like a jinx.

He wonders sometimes if Alex thinks about the possibility of seeing Dylan again at all in the way Dylan thinks about seeing him. Like he’s running the world’s longest marathon, and the finish line keeps moving. Like he’s being stretched along a wire the length of the distance between Arizona and Chicago. Sometimes Dylan wants to know so badly he almost breaks and says something about it—asks Alex if he’s alone in this or not. It was easier not to say anything when they were in the same place; now that there’s a thousand miles of distance, Dylan wants to cross it any way he can.

But then he thinks about how it would feel if the answer were no. Which it would be—there’s no way Alex feels this. Dylan can’t believe _he_ still feels it like this, that he hasn’t gotten over it yet, settled back into sanity. But then he finds himself lying awake late at night, googling pictures of Alex with the Blackhawks just to see his face.

Yeah. He definitely can’t tell Alex about this.

Anyway, Alex doesn’t need him. Alex is fine. Alex is scoring in the NHL.

It takes three games for Dylan to score with the Coyotes after he’s called back up. He’s elated when he does, not to mention relieved, even though the team doesn’t need it: they’re already up 4-0 against the Devils. But it’s his first goal in the NHL. He gets his picture taken with the puck, and his teammates cheer and clap him on the back, and he thinks: maybe this can work. Maybe this is the start of something.

What he really wants is to hang in there long enough to play the Hawks in Chicago on December 10. It’s at the end of a road swing, and when Dylan gets tapped to leave with the team for Vegas on December 3, he’s hopeful—but he’s been sent home from road trips before. He’s not going to breathe easy until he’s actually on the ice with Alex.

Fuck, Dylan wants to see him again. It’s in every breath he breathes in Columbus, their second-to-last stop on the road trip. Just for five minutes, just a glimpse across the ice. Just to be in the same building with him. He digs his fingers into the inside of his gloves as they leave the Blue Jackets’ ice.

No one pulls him aside in the locker room to tell him he’s going back to Arizona. Dylan gets on the plane to Chicago with the rest of the team that night, and as soon as it takes off, he relaxes. They’re not going to send him back now. Even if he doesn’t get to play—he’ll be there.

He’s anything but relaxed when they land in Chicago. _on the ground!!!_ he texts to Alex, coolness be damned. Alex sends back a little plane-landing emoji and a grinning face.

It drives Dylan crazy, being in the same city that night but not able to see Alex. He thought about trying to make it happen—but it’s after midnight when they land. Dylan can’t skip out on his curfew, even if it wouldn’t be completely weird, Dylan showing up at Alex’s place in the middle of the night when he already has a perfectly good hotel room to go to. There’s no excuse for it.

He goes to that hotel room, and he lies awake for a long time, thinking, _He’s here._ Just a few miles away.

He’s not sure what to text the next morning. It’s a game day; Alex probably has skate and other things to do. For that matter, _Dylan_ has skate and also other things to do, like eat lunch and take a nap and not spazz out all over his former teammate. But they’re flying back to Arizona after the game tonight and what if Dylan doesn’t really get to see him? What if it really is just a view across the ice at Alex in an opponent’s colors?

He starts like three different texts before practice and deletes all of them. Then, while he’s still thinking, one comes in from Alex: _you free for lunch?_

_yes,_ Dylan types without thinking, and then pauses before sending it. They have a team lunch. But Dylan can maybe skip that, right? Sometimes guys do, when they have family and shit in the area. _ill check,_ he sends.

It’s maybe not the best thing to request when he’s only been on the team a couple of weeks, especially when it isn’t actually family. But still. He can’t just _not_ try to see Alex.

“Uh, coach?” he says, going up to Tocchet before practice. “I have a—uh, one of my teammates from Erie is here in the city, and I really want to, um. I know it’s not, like, but—would it be okay if I had lunch with him instead of with the team?”

Tocchet gives him a hard look that lasts long enough for Dylan to start to sweat. Finally he says, “Don’t miss your nap.”

“No, sir,” Dylan says, so relieved he practically bounces back to his phone. _ill be there,_ he sends.

Alex sends him exclamation points.

Dylan gets a Lyft to Alex’s place after practice. He’s jiggling his knee on the seat, watching the city going by. He likes the smell of Chicago: it smells like a city should smell, like Erie, like Toronto. Cold and just a little bit damp, the scent of exhaust and fallen leaves and green growing things around the edges. Plus, Alex is here. That makes everything smell better, just knowing that.

He presses the button for Alex’s apartment, and a moment later the door buzzes, and Dylan bounds up the stairs. Fuck the elevator, it’s only the eighth floor. He gets out of the stairs and Alex is already opening the door, his square smiling face on the other side, and, “Hi,” Alex says, “hi, hi,” and Dylan’s laughing and they’re both laughing and he’s tackle-hugging Alex into his own apartment.

He squeezes him tight, and then he pushes him back to arm’s length to look at him and then he hugs him again. Alex is laughing again. Dylan holds him and he smells him and he smells like home and warmth and everything Dylan’s been missing the past three and a half months, and he buries his nose in Alex’s hair and breathes in deep.

He feels it when the mood changes. It gets a little bit too—he feels the heat of it transform his body, and he has to pull away. Doesn’t trust himself to stay close.

It doesn’t matter, though. It’s still Alex. Dylan shoots him a smile, and Alex smiles back. He probably didn’t even notice the weirdness.

His apartment is great. It’s just the kind of thing Dyan would want, if he were getting his own place: big and bright and airy, good view, good light, newly finished so that it doesn’t smell of anyone except Alex.

It all smells like Alex. Dylan’s high on that smell. He’s giddy with it, swinging his legs on the high stool at Alex’s kitchen island while Alex serves up food. “You learned to cook,” Dylan says while Alex gets the casserole dish out of the oven.

“No, I got a meal service,” Alex says, looking vaguely embarrassed about it.

“No, I know, but heating stuff up, still a big step for you,” Dylan says. “I wouldn’t have thought you could handle it.”

They can’t stop talking during lunch. It’s like when Dylan picked him up from the airport in August: lots of energy, spilling itself out in conversation. Dylan watches the animation of Alex’s face, tracks his eyes as he looks from his food to Dylan, grins at the way Alex ducks his head when he laughs. It feels like they’re in their own pool of light, a perfect happy one where nothing could be wrong with the world.

Then they’ve finished eating, and there’s a lull, and Dylan starts thinking about how he’s going to need to go back. While there was still food on their plates it felt far away; now the plates are in the sink, the leftovers put away, and there’s nothing standing between him and departure.

“Do you have to go back?” Alex asks.

“I mean,” Dylan says. _No, never_ is not a good answer. “I have to nap.”

“You could nap here,” Alex says.

“Yeah,” Dylan says gratefully, swallowing as his heart tries to leap into his throat. “Yes, okay, let me just.”

He texts Fish to let him know he won’t be back until after his nap, and then Alex shows him to the bedroom. It’s as clean and bright as the rest of the apartment—“Cleaning service,” Alex admits—and it smells even more like Alex, like the sleep-soft skin of his neck when they were waking up together in Toronto.

Alex gives Dylan clothes to sleep in: “If those shorts will stay up,” he says with a smirk.

“Hey, I am not that skinny anymore,” Dylan says, and it’s true. He’s put on more muscle this fall.

He still feels trembly instead of solid when they climb into bed together, though.Alex feels solid. Dylan wants to drape himself over him. Wants to lie on his back and bare his belly for him and beg. Is shuddering with the effort not to.

“Are you cold?” Alex asks. “I can turn up the heat.”

“No, let’s just,” Dylan says, and he feels guilty for the way Alex puts his hands on him right away, rubbing up his arms to warm them. Feels like he’s having this under false pretenses. But he has it. Finally, finally, he has it.

Lying in a bed with Alex is so different from any other time Dylan’s been in bed in his life. Like—like finally taking a shower when all you’ve been doing up till now is splashing your face and hands at the sink. It just can’t even compare. Dylan feels his muscles relaxing, tension he didn’t know he had draining out of him. And he’s horribly greedy, because all he wants is more.

Alex is so close, and all Dylan can think about are the ways he could be closer. He’s breathing harder than he should be with the strain of holding back. He wants to roll over and bury his nose in Alex’s neck. Then lick up the paper-thin skin there, taste the stubble on his chin, latch onto his mouth and—

“Are you okay?” Alex puts his hand on Dylan’s shoulder, probably because he’s frowning like a freak. “Do you—do you want to shift?”

Dylan could shift. It might even be a good idea: he hasn’t shifted with anyone since his parents came to visit a while back. He’s been running at the full moon alone, over sandy dirt that feels all wrong under his paws. But he doesn’t want to be the wolf with Alex right now. He wants to be human, even if being human is kind of torturous.

“No,” he says. “I just, you know. I’m good.”

“Okay,” Alex says, and rolls over so he’s half on top of Dylan. Dylan puts his arms around him, and breathes deep of the smell of the top of his head, and tries to store every last bit of this feeling in his body for the long months ahead.

***

It’s weird to face off against Alex that night. Even weirder than Dylan expected. He’s had the chance to play former teammates and linemates before—hell, he faced off against Connor once or twice in his first game back up with the Coyotes. But it’s been two-plus years since he played with Connor, and he played with Alex just this past spring. He still half-expects to see Alex there with him every time he takes to the ice.

Alex is there this time, but on the wrong side. Dylan’s thrown off every time they’re on the ice together—which isn’t that often, but it’s enough. Dylan knows he’s skating embarrassingly badly. He can’t even remember which team he’s on half the time. Alex and Jonathan Toews have this jumping-into-each-other thing they do when they first come onto the ice, and Dylan’s seen it on TV, and, okay, been sort of jealous—but seeing it on the ice, feeling it as a thing he’s actively not a part of, makes Dylan want to slide down to the footwell at the bottom of the bench and never come up again.

Chicago wins. It’s not entirely Dylan’s fault. But he certainly doesn’t do anything to prevent it.

He slinks out of the visitor locker room as quickly as he can, showering while the media is talking to the actual competent players, and goes to find the Blackhawks’ room. He knows he can’t spend a lot of time with Alex, but he feels like he needs to see him, have one positive interaction after three hours of feeling like he was tearing at his own chest every time he didn’t pass to him on the ice.

He’s hoping he’ll find Alex without having to talk to the other guys, but Patrick Kane comes out of the room first. “Oh, hey,” he says when he sees Dylan. “How’s life in the NHL? You adjusting okay?”

Dylan’s not expecting the question. He’s not actually expecting Kane to talk to him at all. Dylan’s seen his name flash by a bunch in recent months in the wolf chat, but he hasn’t been paying a lot of attention: he still doesn’t feel like he belongs in the chat yet. “Uh, yeah,” he says, because what else is he going to say? “I mean, it’s tough, but yeah.”

“That’s good,” Kane says. “I remember when I started, there was a lot of—well, I had a bunch of shit to deal with. Hopefully it’s better for you now.”

“Yeah, definitely,” Dylan says. It’s easy for him now. It should be easy.

Alex comes out behind Kane. “Hey,” Alex says, breaking into a smile, and Dylan turns toward him, grateful to be able to turn away from Kane.

They only have like ten minutes together. Dylan has to go get on the team bus to the airport. And they’re in the halls of the UC, so Dylan can’t do the wolf touchy stuff that would be weird in front of other people. He’s not even really sure what they talk about; he’s distracted by how badly he wants to hold him. It’s throbbing in the middle of his chest, this need to put hands on Alex after all the distance on the ice, and—would it be so bad if he pushed him against the wall and put his mouth on him? Just a little? They’ve done it before. Maybe—

Dylan keeps his hands to himself. With effort. But Alex hugs him goodbye and Dylan lets himself squeeze tight and it’s good, it’s so fucking good, Dylan doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to live without it.

“See you in February,” Alex says when they separate, and Dylan can only nod. February 12; they can do this again. He just has to make it two months.

***

On December 19, the Coyotes acquire Josh Archibald from the Penguins. Chayka calls Dylan and tells him he’s being sent down.

Dylan texts Alex. _guess i wont be seeing you in february after all._

Alex texts back. It’s a string of sad faces. Dylan clicks his phone off and pulls his knees up onto the seat and drops his head onto them as the bus takes him from Phoenix to Tucson.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for depression-like symptoms.

A person can get used to life like this. A person can get used to most things. It’s all about—getting through the day. Finding the energy, somewhere, to perform on the ice. Moving your body enough during the day so that you’re tired enough to go to sleep when night falls.

Dylan’s doing it. He’s even skating well. He’s learning his teammates’ patterns, figuring out how to work with them on the ice. They’re winning more than they’re losing, and Dylan is scoring more than he’s not.

“Are you okay?” Alex says, squinting at him over FaceTime. “You seem kind of.” He makes a hand motion and shrugs.

“No, I’m good,” Dylan says. He scored a goal yesterday. The team won. He hit his workout targets today. He has to be good.

“Okay. You just seem…I don’t know,” Alex says.

They get off the phone pretty soon after that. It’s easier, when Dylan doesn’t talk to Alex too often. It makes his chest feel all weird, sometimes for hours afterward, and Dylan doesn’t need that. He just needs to keep playing.

February, when Chicago is coming to play the Coyotes, comes and goes. Dylan isn’t in town for the game. He didn’t expect to be. If it’s a little harder to breathe on the afternoon of the twelfth, when he knows Alex is in Phoenix, it goes away by the night.

They pull him up again in late March when the Coyotes aren’t in playoff contention anymore, when it doesn’t matter. Dylan’s not even mad about it. It makes sense that they’d throw him in for 12 or 14 minutes a night for a few weeks at the end of the season. Make sure they really weren’t missing anything. Maybe help them in their race for a top draft pick—for whatever good that did them before.

He flies home in May after he helps the Roadrunners wash out in round two of the Calder Cup playoffs. His mom picks him up from the airport and looks him up and down. “Have you been eating enough?”

“My weight hasn’t dropped,” Dylan says. He’s been lifting a lot: losing hours to it, focusing on nothing but the burn in his muscles.

“Yeah, I guess that’s not it,” his mom says.

She says a lot of things over the next few days. “Have you reached out to Mitch and Connor?” she asks.

“I think they’re busy,” Dylan says. Mitch is traveling, or something—he wouldn’t give the details—and Dylan isn’t exactly sure what Connor’s doing. Hanging out with friends who are actually in the NHL, probably. Dylan hasn’t been texting him much.

“How about Mikey McLeod?” his mom asks. “You two were friends. Or some of your old Otters buddies.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dylan says, but he doesn’t reach out.

His mom tries a different tack a few days later, when Dylan’s on the couch watching TV after dinner. She came in a while back and is sitting next to him, her hand on his head, stroking a little bit. Dylan hasn’t done anything about it; it doesn’t feel like all that much. “Have you been dating in Arizona?” she asks.

“A little,” Dylan says.

It’s a lie. He hasn’t been dating at all. When the other guys bug him about it, he makes cracks about focusing on his training, how he’s going to get better than all of them, but the truth is that he’s just not interested. He hasn’t even been jerking off much this year. He hasn’t hooked up since Erie, and he doesn’t miss it.

“I was thinking, it might be good for you if you thought about a bond with someone,” she says. “I know we can’t really give you what you need in a pack when you’re so far away. If there’s anyone special in Arizona, you might think about whether you want to take that step with her. Or—with him. Whoever.”

Dylan feels a tiny contraction in his gut at that last part, but it smooths back out. “Uh, yeah. I’ll think about it.”

He doesn’t say anything else. After a while she gets up and leaves.

She’s waiting in the kitchen, though, when he gets back from his run Saturday morning. He’s been running pretty much every day: not what he would normally do so soon after the season, but it’s so much easier to get through the day when he pushes his body like this. He’s reaching into the fridge for a drink when his mom says, “What about your friend Alex?”

Dylan stops with his hand on the neck of a Gatorade bottle, feeling a pulse travel through him, there, there, gone. “What about him?”

“You liked hanging out with him last summer,” she says. “Maybe the two of you could get together again.”

“I’m sure he has other things to do,” Dylan says. His heart is pounding harder than it should be. He pushed himself really hard on the run, probably.

“I’m sure he would love to see you,” she says. “You should ask him to come visit.”

“Maybe I will,” Dylan says, and leaves the room. It doesn’t feel safe to stay there. He gets into the shower, lets his mind empty out again, and that’s better.

He thinks a little bit that night about asking Alex. But that feels like so much effort.

He keeps working out in the mornings, and in the afternoons he mostly plays video games or watches TV when the games get too tiring. Then he goes to sleep early and wakes up to work out again.

“Dude, is this what not being in the NHL has done to you?” Ryan asks when he’s over one afternoon, when Dylan is in the family room watching whatever’s on TV. “Get it together.”

Dylan doesn’t know what Ryan is talking about. He’s fine.

Alex calls him in mid-June when Dylan hasn’t talked to him in a few weeks. “You should come visit,” Alex says.

“I don’t know,” Dylan says. There’s something squeezing in his gut, some reason not to. “There’s kind of a lot going on here.”

“So just come for a few days,” Alex says. “You haven’t even met Ralph DeBrindog yet.”

There’s a weird shivery feeling running through him. Dylan doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t like it. He’s going to say no—obviously he’s going to say no—so it’s a surprise when he opens his mouth and says, “Yeah, okay. I’ll come.”

“Awesome,” Alex says, smiling at him all big, and Dylan looks at his face and feels—he doesn’t know what he feels. Nothing, really. He hangs up the phone and lies there, staring up at his bedroom ceiling, until everything feels blank and smooth and steady again.

He buys the tickets for a week that works for Alex. Dylan doesn’t really have any plans.

He feels weird on the flight to Michigan. He doesn’t usually get airsick, and there isn’t even turbulence, but his stomach is churning. He tries to stare out the window and zone, but his thoughts keep skittering around.

He starts breathing harder as they land in Detroit, great gulping breaths. Maybe there’s something wrong with the plane’s oxygen or whatever, because it gets worse while he waits to deplane, and he can’t see properly as he goes down the aisle. His vision is tunneling, getting fuzzy around the edges. But he doesn’t have any trouble navigating the airport; he wheels his suitcase blindly down the wide airport corridors without thinking about where he’s going. It’s like his feet know where he’s going even when his mind doesn’t. Then he’s coming out past security and his heart is thudding hard and he’s looking ahead and there, standing by the baggage claim, the only clear point in a world of fuzz, the only person in the room in the building in the entire world—

Alex.

Dylan doesn’t notice himself starting to speed up. He’s focused on Alex, walking fast, maybe running a little, and Alex puts his arms out, and Dylan lets himself fall onto him with a crash like all the ice in the world cracking.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” he hears himself saying, and Alex isn’t saying anything, just holding on and oh wow, has Dylan even smelled anything in the world in the last six months? _This_ scent. This is a scent. He’s breathing hard, almost sobbing, as he takes in great gulps of it. “Fuck, I _missed_ you.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Alex says, a laugh in his voice, but he’s still holding on.

Dylan doesn’t want to let go. He feels like he physically can’t. He can hear Alex’s heartbeat; how is he supposed to give that up? But they’re in the airport, and after a while he starts to realize how weird this must look.

He makes himself pull back. It’s okay—he can have more of this. He’s here for a week.

He can’t believe he thought about not coming. He doesn’t know what he was thinking.

Alex is kind of laughing at him, but in a happy way. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Dylan says. It feels true, now. He feels completely different than he did five minutes ago. He feels like he wasn’t even _in_ his body five minutes ago. Now he can smell things, see things, hear them—there’s a clatter of talking and moving people all around them and Dylan doesn’t even want to tune it out. He feels himself smiling, for the first time in what feels like forever.

Alex slugs him in the arm, leaves his hand there. “You wanna go get some food?”

“Fuck yes,” Dylan says. He’s suddenly starving.

***

They go to have lunch, and then they go to Alex’s parents’ house, and Dylan feels his head clearing more with every passing minute. All that ice that cracked apart when Dylan first touched Alex in the airport, it’s being washed away, melting in the warmth of Alex’s scent and the sound of his voice and the set of his shoulders, the spread of his thighs on the seat, the grip of his fingers around the steering wheel.

“I’m so excited for you to meet Ralph,” Alex says as he drives. “He’s just the best dog, you’re gonna love him.”

Dylan has zero doubts about that. He’s Alex’s dog; of course Dylan will love him. “I already met him, on the phone, remember?”

“Yeah, but phone isn’t the same,” Alex says, cutting his eyes away from the road to give Dylan a little smile, and Dylan couldn’t agree more. He feels like he can barely remember the phone calls from the past few months. They’re part of the life of someone who feels totally different from the person he is right now. The phone never made his blood course through his body like it’s rediscovered its blood vessels. It never made the world fill with color and scent.

He can smell the dog a little already, traces of him on Alex’s skin. He wants to press his nose against Alex’s neck and smell more. He wants a lot of things. He has to tuck his hands under his thighs to keep from doing some of those things, but still, just wanting them—Dylan hasn’t felt that in so long. Hasn’t wanted _anything._

Ralph the dog jumps on Alex as he walks in, and then he catches Dylan’s scent and whines, lowering his head and tucking his tail between his legs. Dylan steps in close and stands at his full height over the dog. “Good boy,” he says, pitching his voice low: not baby-playful, the way Alex’s was when he greeted Ralph, but firm and commanding.

Ralph rolls over, baring his belly, and Dylan crouches down and lays a hand there. Ralph stretches up and licks Dylan’s chin, and Dylan stays still and lets him finish: lets him show his submission. “Yeah, good boy,” he says afterward, and Ralph wriggles and turns back over to jump up on Dylan’s shoulders.

“He’s a Shiba Inu,” Alex says. “They’re supposed to be really good with wolves.”

Dylan ducks his head to hide his smile. He doesn’t know if Alex found that out after he got Ralph, but he likes the idea that it was before, that he did his research beforehand to make sure he got a breed of dog that would get along well with Dylan. A dog that would be a good part of their pack.

No. Not their pack. The thought is a shock, cold water in his mind. They’re not ever going to be a pack.

Still: Alex got a dog that would get along well with wolves. Dylan’s allowed to be happy about that.

“So,” Dylan says, still ruffling Ralph’s ears, “there’s a full moon this week.”

“Yeah, Thursday, right?” Alex says.

Of course he knows. Dylan knew, too, when they were planning this trip, but he wasn’t thinking about it. Or maybe he was—it’s hard to remember _what_ he was thinking last week. “You think this guy wants to run with us?”

“I think that would be awesome,” Alex says, and Dylan probably looks like an idiot, sitting on the floor smiling up at Alex like a dope, but at the moment he doesn’t care at all.

***

They take Ralph out, and Alex tells stories about the weird things Ralph’s tried to eat, and it’s his voice and his words and his scent and he’s _here_. It’s giving Dylan energy like he hasn’t had in months, bursting out of him, too much of it to be contained. They throw the ball for Ralph and wrestle him to the ground and Dylan turns his head to smile at Alex while they’re sprawled across the grass and he’d forgotten what it felt like to be happy.

They go back inside after and say hi to Alex’s parents and flop onto the couch in their family room. At first they’re sprawled at opposite ends, Alex with his hand on Dylan’s ankle, and it feels good—so good for Alex to have any kind of a hold on him—but it’s not really enough contact, and Dylan migrates across the couch until his head is up by Alex’s shoulder and he’s sort of hugging his side. Alex hooks his arm around Dylan, his hand on Dylan’s back, resting in the middle of his spine, and it’s perfect.

Dylan’s spent a lot of time over the past few months being quiet and calm. But that was the calm of emptiness. Now he’s full: full of Alex’s scent in his nose and Alex’s body pressed against him and the feelings that are swelling inside his chest. It would have been too much feeling to deal with yesterday, but Dylan feels so much stronger now. Like his body has more substance. He can deal with feeling things now.

It’s such a good week. Alex takes him to the rink he skated on growing up, and shows him around some of Detroit. They sneak into this old auto body factory that Alex says he and his friends used to go to when they were teenagers—“Like you’re not basically still a teenager,” Dylan says—and Alex dares him to climb up one of the walls and then laughs and pulls on his foot when he actually goes to do it.

“Can’t make you violate the terms of your contract,” Alex says.

“Pretty sure they wouldn’t care,” Dylan says, and then looks away, wishing he hadn’t said that. He doesn’t want to think about the outside world right now.

It still exists, though. It exists in the calls Alex takes from his agent, in the schedule updates he keeps getting about the Blackhawks fan convention. Dylan does his best to ignore all that. He’s not ready to think about it.

They go up to bed that first night, and Dylan’s not sure what to expect. There’s no air mattress on the floor of Alex’s room. “I told my mom we were used to sharing,” Alex says. “That okay?”

Dylan nods, voice suddenly not working. It’s very, very okay.

Alex only has a full-sized bed, but that’s almost better. Dylan curls up that night with his arm across Alex’s chest and feels Alex’s breath rising and falling, rising and falling, the solid warmth of his body. He feels like he’s regrowing some vital part of himself he’d lost.

He hadn’t jerked off in weeks before coming to Michigan. After that first night he jerks off in the shower every day, imagining Alex’s hands on him and Alex’s mouth against his. Alex pushing him to his knees and making Dylan suck his cock, Alex shoving him against the wall and kissing him. Alex finally letting Dylan give him what’s his.

None of that’s going to happen. But Dylan almost doesn’t care: just having Alex here is enough. Especially when Dylan’s in his wolf form. The full moon comes on Thursday, and Alex takes them out to an area of woods where they can run, him and Dylan and Ralph, and Dylan feels their presence even when they’re spread out along the trail, the two of them connected to him so strongly they might as well be touching, their feet hitting the ground in unison like they’re one organism.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to give this up again.

It gets harder and harder not to think about that as the week goes on. The night before his flight home, Dylan can’t stop shaking, lying in bed with Alex, and Alex wraps his arms around him and holds him and that helps but soon he won’t be able to do that.

“I’m going to miss you,” Dylan whispers into the side of Alex’s face.

“I know,” Alex says. “Me too,” and Dylan feels like it’s true. He doesn’t usually feel like Alex is in this with him but he does right now. They’re wrapped up together, holding on so tightly, and Dylan feels like there’s a web running through the two of them. Like their blood vessels have extended and are running through both their bodies, and when Dylan leaves he’s going to be left with only half his veins.

“Why did we have to be—” he says, and breaks off: he’s not sure how he would have ended that sentence, but it doesn’t matter, since he’s breathing too hard to finish.

Probably for the best. He’d be saying too much. But Alex says, “Yeah,” all low, like a shiver over Dylan’s skin.

Dylan tips his head forward so that it’s resting against Alex’s shoulder. “I wish—I didn’t want so much,” he whispers.

Alex sucks in a breath. For a moment Dylan thinks he did go too far, say too much. And he thinks—he thinks, _good._ He’s relieved.

He’s tired of pretending to be normal. He’s too tired to pretend he doesn’t want this. The effort’s worn him thin, rubbed off all his layers until there’s almost nothing left.

Alex is breathing hard next to him. His breath is hot and sweet and minty and Dylan tips his head until he finds that mouth with his own.

The first touch of their mouths is so good Dylan thinks he’s dreaming it. Alex’s mouth opens under his, and Dylan groans and kisses him, kisses him with all the flooding hunger he’s been trying to hold back all week. Alex rolls him over and lies on top of him, and Dylan feels his muscles dissolving under Alex’s body, the heat of his tongue.

Alex runs his hands down Dylan’s arms, finds his hands, puts them up over Dylan’s head, and holds them there. Dylan gasps at the bolt of heat that goes through him and bucks his hips up.

He’s too desperate for this to last long. It’s not long before he’s gasping wetly into the kiss, jerking his hips, feeling like he’s losing his mind. He’s trying to be quiet but there are these sounds leaking out of him. “Sh, sh,” Alex says, smothering Dylan’s mouth with his own, and then he turns and rummages in his nightstand, and comes out with lube and a condom.

He opens Dylan up slowly and carefully while Dylan vibrates under the touch. Alex’s tongue is on his neck, his nipples, completing the electric circuit that’s starting with Alex’s fingers against his prostate, and when Alex puts his mouth back on Dylan’s Dylan sucks on his tongue urgently, wanting more of Alex inside of him. If he takes him deep enough inside he’ll never have to let him go.

The first slide of Alex’s cock inside him feels like he’s being pinned, anchored to something so solid and strong and real he’ll never have to drift again. It only gets better from there: Alex pushing in and in and in. They’re both trying to keep quiet, just these little gasps and _ah_ ’s and the clenching grip of Alex’s fingers on his shoulders. Alex’s face is working, barely visible in the dim light from the street, and Dylan watches hungrily except when his eyelids flutter shut. Everything smells of them, and he wants to breathe it all in and keep it forever.

Alex should fuck him harder. If Alex fucks him harder, they’ll be one person instead of two, and Dylan will never have to live without this part of him. He needs it. He’s gonna die if he doesn’t—

Alex makes this strangled sound and his cock stutters inside Dylan and Dylan is lost. He clenches down around Alex’s cock and makes Alex rear up and muffle a shout with his hand. “Fuck, fuck—” Alex says into his hand, and Dylan gasps at the thing rolling through him. His knot wants to pop again, he can feel it, remembers the feeling, but maybe if he focuses on not—

“You can,” Alex says, like he knows, and then his hand is closing around Dylan’s cock and Dylan curls up like he’s been punched and his knot pops into Alex’s hand. “Yeah, yes,” Alex says, and rolls them over so that Dylan can kiss him, can bury his tongue in Alex’s mouth while Alex milks his knot. His cock is still in Dylan’s ass, and it must be painful, the way that Dylan’s clenching down on him, but he doesn’t tell Dylan to pull off. Doesn’t make Dylan break the perfect circle of their bodies.

By the time Alex has to, when he has to withdraw to keep the condom from coming off, Dylan’s settled into a warm haze of Alex’s hand on his cock and their scents mingling in the air around him. He pulls Alex in and licks up his neck and lets Alex pull the blankets up over them again, safe and cocooned and so close together they can never be pulled apart.

***

Dylan doesn’t get how bad it’s going to be until he’s on the plane flying back to Toronto.

They say goodbye at the airport, kissing frantically in the front seat of Alex’s car behind tinted windows. They’re both still groggy—they set an alarm to get up in time, and then Alex fingered Dylan until he came and they had to rush not to miss the flight—and it’s a struggle to pull away from Alex’s mouth. “I’ll call you tonight,” Alex says, eyes bright, and Dylan has to kiss him again and then he really really has to go or he’s not going to have time to get through security.

He gets through security by the seat of his pants, still warm with the feeling of Alex’s mouth and hands on him. It’s not until he’s on the plane that he starts to cool down. Then the plane takes off, and they’re miles up in the air and moving fast, and Dylan realizes—he’s not going to see Alex again for months.

The shaking starts deep in his belly. It’s like in Alex’s bed the night before, but this time there’s no Alex to touch him and make it go away. His whole body is shaking before long, muscles tight and jerking painfully when he tries to keep them still.

“Sir, are you all right?” the flight attendant asks him when he’s got his hands under his thighs and his head tipped against the seat in front of him, trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

“Just—airsick,” he manages to get out.

“All right, well, there’s an airsickness bag in your seat pocket if you need it,” she says. The man in the seat next to him is giving him an alarmed glance.

The shaking doesn’t stop until he’s through customs in Toronto, and by then he’s sore and exhausted and basically wants to lie down on the ground and sleep forever. Wants to lie down with—but that thought sends another shudder through him.

He can’t do this.

That’s the thought that keeps surfacing in his mind on the trip home. He’s in the backseat of an Uber, hugging his bag to his chest, and the air coming from the vents feels like it’s flaying his skin off. He reaches for the numbness he had before he went to Michigan—anything to get away from this—but it’s not there. Just the pain, threatening to drag him under.

His mom isn’t home when he gets back. Just Matt, who looks up in alarm when Dylan staggers in the front door. “Are you—”

“Flu,” Dylan says, and goes upstairs to stand under the hot shower until he feels like most of the telltale scent has washed off. Then he drags himself into his room and puts himself to bed.

He didn’t know it could feel this bad. Even last year, when he left Alex in Erie, it wasn’t this bad. Even this past spring wasn’t this bad.

He sleeps through Alex’s call that night: sleeps fitfully, his mom next to him at some point, resting a hand on his forehead. A hand he flinches away from. He has dreams, and they make him hurt even more when he wakes up.

He does wake up finally in the morning. He sees the missed call and his stomach turns. He wants, and wanting feels like a blade in his gut.

He can’t do this.

Alex calls back that afternoon. Dylan puts off answering the phone, because he knows what he has to do now, and he doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to do it to either of them. He waits until it’s on the last possible ring before voicemail before he picks up.

“Hi,” Alex says, voice warm. “I missed you yester—”

“I don’t think we should talk anymore,” Dylan says.

There’s silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh,” Alex says slowly. “Oh—okay.”

“Yeah, sorry, it’s just.” Dylan squeezes his eyes shut, the crushed feeling in his chest reminding him why he has to do this. Even if they see each other every summer, even if they see each other for longer than a week, there are still the winter and the fall and the spring to get through. Dylan can’t do this eight months out of the year. And if one week together made things this much worse—“I think it’ll be better that way.”

“Are you sure?” Alex says. His voice is—Dylan doesn’t want to think about what his voice might be doing. “I know it’s, you know, the distance, but—”

“Yeah,” Dylan says quickly. He’s not strong enough to resist if Alex starts arguing. He’s already tempted by the things he wants to hear: Alex telling him how much last night meant to him, how they’ll make it work, how Alex will do anything to have them be together.

He doesn’t even know if Alex would say that. He probably wouldn’t. They never talked about what last night meant.

“I’m so sorry,” Dylan says. He knows this isn’t fair, that what Alex deserves is a friend who can be normal despite this shit, but Dylan can’t do this anymore. He’s already fighting just to keep breathing. “This is the way it has to be.”

A minute later, when he’s off the phone, Dylan lies on the bed with the phone between his hands and lets the ache move through him in waves. It’s okay: Alex will find someone better than him. And Dylan—Dylan will find the numbness again. It won’t hurt like this forever.


	8. Chapter 8

It won’t hurt forever—it can’t possibly. But it hurts all that summer, the numb feeling creeping in around the edges but not quite reaching the ache in the center of Dylan’s chest. By the time he gets on a plane to Arizona in late September, he’s learned not to move too fast or think too much and he can mostly ignore it.

“I hope you have a good year this year,” his mom says when they hug him goodbye at the airport. “I just want you to be happy.”

“I know,” Dylan says. And then pulls away, before the hug can make him feel too much and wake up the pain.

Training camp is…it’s the fourth year. Dylan knows how it goes now. He’s given up on hoping for it to go well.

It doesn’t particularly. Dylan doesn’t think he does any better than he did other years. But they keep him this time. Dylan doesn’t think it’s going to last very long, but he gets to stay up that October, playing his 12 or 14 minutes a night. It’s a life.

They go to Chicago on October 18. Dylan’s been trying not to think about it. Every time he does it gets harder to breathe again.

Damage control, though: he won’t see Alex except on the ice. He won’t breathe in his scent, won’t wake up those parts of himself that make him sweat and shake if he remembers too hard.

Just knowing he’ll see Alex on the ice is more than enough to do damage. Dylan’s shaky all day before the game, bad at focusing on what anyone’s saying to him. Then they get to the UC, and Dylan—smells Alex.

He probably doesn’t actually. Alex is probably far away, around lots of corners and behind closed doors. But Dylan feels like he smells him, feels it so strongly, and he has to go into the bathroom and brace himself over a toilet until he’s sure he isn’t going to throw up.

It’s worse once Alex comes out of the tunnel onto the ice. The sight of him is like a blow to the face. Dylan keeps orienting toward him, can’t remember how to point his eyes at things that aren’t Alex or deliberately-not-Alex. Is panting for air before he even starts to skate.

He’s a complete disaster on the ice. The Coyotes actually win, no thanks to Dylan, who loses his balance every time he catches Alex’s scent. Which is everywhere: Dylan can hardly smell anything else. Twenty thousand people in the stadium, and Dylan can smell only one.

They make eye contact exactly once. It’s on the ice, when Dylan’s facing off against Alex’s line. Dylan is trying not to look at Alex while they’re lining up, but he keeps failing, and one of the times he fails, Alex is looking back at him.

It’s like getting checked into the boards. Alex smiles at him a little, a fleeting, tentative thing, and then Dylan’s looking away, concussed, and it’s over and he’s a mess for the whole shift.

They don’t make eye contact in the handshake line. Dylan keeps his eyes down, even when he can tell Alex is coming, even when he can smell him from ten people away and especially when Alex is the next person and then Dylan is sliding into his space and their hands meet.

Alex’s hand closes over his and Dylan’s whole body revolts. His heart leaps into his throat and there’s roaring in his ears and—then Alex is gone, there’s someone else’s hand in front of him, Fischer is nudging him along, and Dylan grabs the next hand blindly, feeling like he might fall over.

It takes him hours that night to fall asleep. He can’t stop shaking. Fish is in the next bed over, dead to the world, and Dylan lies there with his teeth apart so they don’t clack against each other and waits for it to stop.

He survived the game. He made it through. And it’ll be easier next time. He doesn’t have to do it again till March, if he’s even still up by then—and if he keeps skating like he did tonight, he won’t be.

He doesn’t keep skating quite like that, of course—he’s not that bad when Alex isn’t there. But he isn’t much better, even when they’re not playing the Hawks. It’s like there’s a cloud moving around with him, and Dylan can see through the cloud, can move through it, but everything’s a little delayed. A little duller. It makes it hard to even care enough to work harder. So he’s not surprised when he gets a call from Chayka in late November.

What he is surprised about, in a vague way, is that it hasn’t happened sooner. He only got his third goal of the season in the game two days ago. Maybe Chayka’s been feeling more optimistic this year for some reason. That was a mistake.

Dylan’s playing Fortnite when the phone rings, and he pauses the game, even though he barely has to listen to what Chayka says by now. He knows this spiel. There’s the, “We appreciate everything you’ve done for this team,” and the “unfortunately” and the—

Wait.

“I’m sorry,” he says, straightening up and blinking at the TV screen. Lightning is arcing across the sky in the picture, glaring pink against dark blue. “Can you say that again?”

“We’ve traded you to Chicago,” Chayka repeats, deliberately patient, and then he’s saying something else, Dylan doesn’t even know what, because he can’t hear. He can’t hear anything except _Chicago._

Then he’s off the phone, and he’s sitting on the ground, not sure how he got there. He thinks maybe he tried to stand up. There’s a throbbing spot on his shin where he clipped the coffee table coming down.

“Dude, what was that?” Jakob asks, poking his head in. “Are you dying in here?”

“I’m leaving,” Dylan says. His hands are still clenched around his phone. “I think—I think I’m going to Chicago.”

Jakob makes a face. “You _think,_ or…” But Dylan’s not listening. He’s opening his phone app again.

There are so many reasons he shouldn’t call. They’re all swirling around in his head. But he can’t see any of them clearly and the word is still echoing in his mind: _Chicago._ He’s allowed, right? This changes everything. He has to be. He has to be allowed.

He presses the contact.

The phone rings in his ear, loud and jangling. Then: “Dylan,” Alex’s voice is saying. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

Dylan closes his eyes against that voice. He hasn’t heard that voice in so long. “I’m coming to Chicago,” he says.

“Coming?” Alex says. “Like—what do you—”

“They traded me,” Dylan says. “To Chicago. I’m coming to Chicago.”

There’s a pause, in which all of Dylan’s insides go cold and panicky. There’s static in his ears. What if Alex—

“When are you coming?” Alex asks.

“Tomorrow,” Dylan says. “Or, today. I don’t know. I think someone else is going to call me—”

“You should stay with me,” Alex says quickly. “Uh. I mean. You don’t have to. But if you don’t want to stay in a hotel—”

“No, that’s.” Dylan puts his head down on his knees. His chest is so crowded it barely has room for his lungs to expand. “Yes,” he says, and it’s his whole body saying it, every bit of him saying _yes, yes, yes._ “Yeah,” he says again. “That would be good.”

***

It’s not gonna be good. It’s such a mistake. Dylan knows that, and yet, as he throws his stuff in suitcases, as he calls his parents, as he gets in a cab to the rink, all he can think is, _I’m going to see him again._

It’s not helpful, being this distracted. The whole night is a whirlwind. They’re flying him out tonight, him and Brendan Perlini, and they have to go to the rink at fucking eleven o’clock at night to get their gear from the one equipment manager who’s there to help. They throw their shit together with the manic energy of people who just found out they have a six a.m. flight one hours ago.

It’s still pitch black when they pull up to the airport, buzzing on adrenaline and leaden with exhaustion. There’s a storm coming to the Chicago area, and Dylan doesn’t relax until the plane engines start powering up and they’re taking off.

“Man, new team,” Pearls says next to him while the acceleration presses them back to their seats. “What do you think? Gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, I don’t even know,” Dylan says. Only a few hours. Only a few hours now.

***

They get to the MB Ice Arena just in time for practice. Stan Bowman meets them at the door and shakes their hands, and they walk into the arena, and Alex’s scent hits Dylan like a ton of bricks.

Alex isn’t even here. Not in the hallway, anyway. But he has been here recently and Dylan can’t smell anything else. He takes in a great gulp of air and his skin is tingling, his brain tumbling end over end.

_Be cool,_ he tells himself. _Be cool._ He follows Stan on shaky legs into the locker room.

“Boys, meet your new teammates,” Stan says, and Alex is _there._

Dylan doesn’t know where to look. He knows exactly where Alex is in the room, and he can’t look and he can’t not look and he’s going to, like, fall down or something. Someone is coming over to talk to them, Jonathan Toews, he thinks, and Dylan tries to keep his eyes on him but they skitter to the side and then he’s looking at Alex.

Alex is looking back at him. It feels like being slammed over the head. Alex isn’t smiling or anything, but he doesn’t seem hostile, he just seems—Dylan tears his eyes away and tries to focus on the other guys who are coming up to introduce themselves. He’s breathing way too hard.

Alex comes up near the end, after Patrick Kane. Kaner’s an omega, his scent should be screaming in Dylan’s nostrils, but Dylan can barely smell him with Alex standing right there.

“Hey,” Alex says, a tentative smile on his face. Dylan feels himself smile back, crooked, just as tentative, and Kane is gone and Alex takes his hand and does the classic bro-hug: hands clasped, a clap on the back. He doesn’t pull Dylan in very far.

Dylan feels his touch like a fever. Alex pulls back, and Dylan’s body is still reacting, reeling, like Alex’s touch was a minor natural disaster. But he survived it. He’s here in Chicago, and Alex is _here,_ and Dylan is still alive.

Practice that morning is edged in unreality. Dylan hasn’t slept, and everyone around him is unfamiliar, every play new in some way. But none of it’s throwing him off as much as Alex being on the ice with him again. 

Dylan is so aware of him at all times. It’s a distraction, mostly. But it also gives him his one brilliant moment of the practice: when he passes to Alex without looking, bypassing a whole group of defenders. He doesn’t even think about doing it. He just knows Alex will be there, and he does it.

Alex beams at him afterward. Dylan has to steady himself on the boards.

_Don’t get used to this,_ he tells himself. Chicago is a better team than Arizona; they’re not going to keep him up even as long as Arizona did. Dylan can’t get attached. He can’t fall off that cliff again.

Alex is waiting for him after practice, after Dylan finishes talking to the trainers and the equipment guys. Dylan knows he’s there even before he comes out—feels like he can’t separate himself from the tug of Alex’s presence. Lets it pull him along.

Alex is giving him that tentative smile again. “Back to my place?” he asks.

“Sure,” Dylan says, and tries to ignore how right it feels, following Alex out to his car.

They’re pretty quiet as they drive. Dylan keeps feeling like his tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth. “This must be pretty weird for you,” Alex says at one point.

“I mean, it’s pretty—fast,” Dylan says.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Alex says, shooting him a quick, bright glance, and Dylan’s insides contract.

It’s so hard not to touch him. He can’t, though—the terror is so strong it feels like an illness, every time Dylan thinks about how Alex might react. Dylan doesn’t want to make it weird. But oh, Alex is right there. Waves of shivers keep passing over Dylan’s skin.

Alex takes him back to his place, still full of light and that scent that cuts Dylan off at the knees, and shows him the spare room with the empty dresser. “Got my random shit out of it this morning,” Alex says, like he’s expecting Dylan to be here for a while, and Dylan—

Dylan wants to believe that, too. He wants to—to sink into this life. To get used to Alex standing in the same room as him, not five feet away, to this city that chose him and maybe wants to keep him. It’s the scariest thing he’s ever felt.

“You gonna nap?” Alex asks, and Dylan nods gratefully. Then there’s a door between him and Alex and Dylan can collapse and stop the battle to not touch him, not touch him, not touch him.

He feels marginally better rested when he wakes up a few hours later, and he comes out of the room to find Alex sitting on the couch messing around on his phone. “Hey,” Alex says with a smile. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah,” Dylan says, sitting down on the couch. If they were in Erie, he would have sat down right next to Alex. He wants to sit down right next to Alex. But Ralph is there, and Dylan can’t—it doesn’t seem safe. He sits down on the other side of Ralph, and tucks his hands into his sleeves, and breathes in the scent of Alex that clings to the couch cushions. It’s better this way.

***

The team is pretty friendly to Dylan as he settles in. Well, maybe not Tazer—he has this way of looking at people that’s really flat, almost scary, and Dylan does his best not to meet his eyes too often. But Kaner makes up for it. “You guys should come over for dinner sometime,” Kaner says after giving Dylan his number. “You can meet the kids.”

“Uh, sure,” Dylan says. He’s petty sure he knows what Kaner means by “you guys,” and it makes his stomach squirm.

Coach Colliton is welcoming, too—or at least, it doesn’t seem totally like a line when he tells Dylan they’re looking forward to having him on the team. “We know you can do great things here,” he says.

“Thanks,” Dylan says, while the weight of that expectation sinks claws into his back. He wants to ask: _Did you really want to trade for me? Are you already planning to send me down?_

Arizona traded both him and Perlini for Nick Schmaltz. Dylan looked up Schmaltz: he had 52 points last year, his first with the Blackhawks. That’s as many points as Alex had. Fewer goals, but still. He’s not a nothing player. Dylan wonders if Chicago actually wanted him, or if it was really Pearls they wanted, and if Arizona made them take Dylan, too.

That’s kind of depressing, but actually Dylan’s hoping it’s true. If not, Chicago’s going to be very disappointed.

He’s ready to start disappointing them in the game against Vegas that night. But to his surprise, he’s on the ice with Alex and Kaner in the first, and Alex passes to Kaner who passes to Dylan, and Dylan shoots, and the puck just—goes in.

Dylan blinks at the goal in shock. It hasn’t been that easy to score since Juniors. He’s still standing stunned when Kaner crashes in to hug him, and then Alex skates up and Dylan has a legitimate reason to lean against him, just for a moment.

It’s the most they’ve touched since Dylan got here. He’s a little dizzy from it as they skate to the bench.

The whole game feels easy like that: like his joints have a little more movement in them than they usually do, like he reacts to things a split second faster. In the third, he wins the puck in the offensive zone and sends it to Gustafsson, and Gustafsson scores, and Dylan has a third as many points in this game as he had in his first twenty with the Coyotes.

“That’s what we’re talking about!” Gustafsson roars at him in the celly, and Dylan feels actually happy for a moment.

The next two games go more like Dylan expected: he doesn’t get any points, and the team still hasn’t seen a victory. But Colliton keeps playing him like he doesn’t know that first game was a fluke, even puts him in the second power play unit, and in Dylan’s fourth game, against Calgary, Alex passes to him on the power play and Dylan shoots and it goes right under Mike Smith’s blocker and into the goal.

This time Alex crashes into him first thing, and the look on his face—Dylan tells himself not to think about it too much. But it’s behind his eyelids every time he closes his eyes.

It’s pretty obviously going to be a problem, this thing with Alex. Alex fills the world with color and makes Dylan smile and laugh even right now, when they’re being so tentative around each other. Alex makes him want, even when he tells himself he shouldn’t. Sometimes Dylan will meet his eyes and this breathless feeling will rise in his throat and he’ll think he’d sacrifice anything for this—that just to feel like this for a little while is worth any cost.

It’s not. It’s not worth the way he felt on the flight back from Michigan. The way he felt all spring, and all summer, thin and aching and halfway gone and like parts of him had been ripped out by the roots. But Dylan doesn’t know what to _do_ about it. Alex is on his team. There’s no avoiding him, even if Dylan did get up the self-control to move out. And there’s no way to be around Alex, even a little, and _not_ feel this stuff. He’s fighting not to touch him every single moment.

They have a day off at home after their game against Calgary, and Dylan manages to lean away from Alex when they lie on the couch that afternoon. But then they start arguing about what to watch on TV, and Dylan’s holding the remote out of Alex’s grasp and they’re both laughing, and Alex lunges for it and they both go toppling off the couch and onto the floor.

The air whooshes out of Dylan as he lands with Alex on top of him. He’s planning vaguely to fight back, topple Alex and keep the remote out of his reach, but then Alex leans forward to pin his wrists and Dylan sucks in a breath and everything changes.

He knows Alex feels it, too. He’s looking up at Alex’s face, and he sees the way his pupils blow wide, black swallowing the blue. There’s a drawn-out frozen moment where they lie there staring at each other, Dylan breathing in the superheated air. Then Alex leans forward and kisses him.

Dylan knows as it happens that it’s a terrible idea. It’s just going to destroy him more this time than the time before. But oh holy fuck does it feel good to be kissing Alex again. He’s starving for it, opening his mouth to suck Alex’s tongue inside, letting any thoughts that aren’t Alex’s taste and smell and sharp panting breaths scatter like dust. He’s rolling his hips up, shameless, and gasping into Alex’s mouth and tipping his head back when Alex goes for his neck.

Fuck. Alex is sucking on the hot spots under his chin. Dylan’s always had a sensitive neck—wolf thing—and Alex’s lips and tongue there are setting him on fire. He wants to feel it more, wants Alex to dig into him, wants—

“Please,” he says, the words scraping out of his throat. “Do it, come on, leave a—”

And Alex honest-to-God growls and bites down where his neck meets his shoulder, and Dylan screams.

Ralph starts barking in the other room. Dylan can barely even hear it, he’s so desperate to get Alex’s skin on his. He’s not doing a good job of getting it, just sort of whining and pushing up against Alex’s hold on his wrists but not hard enough to break it, and then Alex lets go of his wrists and sits up and strips his shirt off and starts wrestling Dylan out of his clothes.

They’re both wild-eyed and panting by the time Alex goes for the condom and lube in his wallet, and Dylan doesn’t want to think about why they’re there, doesn’t have to because Alex is sucking at the bite mark on his neck and pressing fingers in and sending a deep hot throb all through Dylan’s body. Dylan feels like parts of him are cracking open, ribcage opening up along his sternum, opening to Alex’s possession, and he’s jerking his hips up for Alex’s cock long before Alex is lined up to push in.

They both exhale at the same time when Alex slides all the way in. Dylan closes his eyes at first as Alex thrusts, letting the wild feeling fill him up, and then he opens his eyes and Alex’s gaze locks onto his and oh _fuck_ he wasn’t ready for this. He starts gulping for air right away—wants to look away but can’t—Alex’s eyes are looking into his, intense like they’re on the ice, intense like he’s trying to peel back all the layers Dylan’s been hiding behind, and if it goes on any longer—

“Fuck, _fuck_ ,” Alex says, throwing his head back, eyes closing as he comes. Dylan falls back limp, Alex’s scent rolling over him like a bulldozer, and he’s coming before he even knows it, pleasure making him seize. He feels—oh, fuck, no, not this time, not again, he feels—

He manages to stop his knot before it pops. It feels like squeezing a muscle he didn’t know he had. He stops it cold, and then lies there panting as the orgasm ebbs away from his body.

Alex is over him, propped up on his hands, catching his breath. He meets Dylan’s eyes—and Dylan looks away, turning his head to the side.

He winces as Alex pulls out. Then Alex isn’t touching him anymore, sitting against the couch by Dylan’s feet, and Dylan shivers as the sweat cools on his skin. The wood floor is hard under his back.

“Sorry,” Alex says.

Dylan can’t see his face. “No, that was.” He breathes in deep. “I mean. I did it, too.”

“I guess.” Alex runs a hand through his own hair. “I guess we probably shouldn’t, right?”

Cold is driving all the heat out of Dylan’s body, his skin clammy. “No,” he says, and it hurts even though it’s true. There are a million reasons why this is a bad idea, even if Alex hadn’t said that. Dylan can’t let himself get—comfortable. Attached. In even deeper than he is.

His ass throbs, used and empty.

“Right,” Alex says, rolling to his feet. “I’ll just—yeah.”

He picks up his clothes and leaves the room. A minute later Dylan hears the shower start running.

Dylan manages to get to his feet. He feels raw, like he just got scoured in sand. He feels—

They shouldn’t have done that. Alex is right. Dylan can’t let—he can’t sink into this any farther than he has. Not if it’s going to end.

He gets into his room and gets the door shut before the shaking starts.

***

This is when Dylan should move out. Alex would probably appreciate it: it’s definitely awkward the next couple of days before they leave for their next road trip. Dylan can’t figure out if he’s looking at Alex too much, or not enough, or how close he should be standing to him. Alex’s scent has gone muted, like he’s trying to hold himself apart from Dylan. Dylan could at least do him the favor of helping.

Dylan lies in his hotel room across from Pearls on the first night of the road trip and thinks, it could be like this all the time. Dylan could get a hotel room, could go stay with someone else, could even get an apartment, bad financial choice or not. But every time he thinks about it, there’s a sharp pulse of pain in his chest, and he’s weak. He can’t make himself leave before he has to.

The bite mark Alex left on his neck has come in nice and clear. Dylan can keep it covered pretty well with shirt collars, but of course the team sees it in the locker room. “Woo, someone’s been getting some,” Seabrook says the first time Dylan strips his shirt off. “Pretty sure that’s a fine, new kid.”

“Heh, yeah,” Dylan says weakly, attempting a smile as they write his name on the fine board. Alex is across the room, back to them. Dylan can’t read anything in the lines of his back.

He looks away, and instead catches Kaner looking at him, eyes narrowed. Dylan ducks his head and feels himself flush. He doesn’t think Kaner can put it together: he and Alex have both showered a few times since then, and they smell like each other anyway from living together. Kaner can’t know.

But Kaner can see the bite mark on his neck, and Kaner knows he’s an alpha.

Dylan knows how weird this is. Alphas are the ones who do the biting, not the other way around. Dylan shouldn’t have been so into it. Shouldn’t love the bite mark now. But every time he sees it in the mirror he flushes with heat. He presses on it when he jerks off, and that little throb of pain makes him come so hard it’s all he can do not to shout in the shower.

Just one more way he’s irredeemably fucked up. He’s stopped counting by this point?

It takes a week for the bite mark to fade. The first morning Dylan can’t find it, he spends a long time standing in front of the mirror, trying to convince himself he can still see a few little marks, but finally he has to admit it’s gone. He stands there for a while after that, hands braced on the bathroom counter until Brendan raps on the door and he has to stumble out.

The team loses four more times in a row, to Anaheim and Vegas on the road and the Habs at home and Winnipeg on the road. Dylan scores twice more. He should probably feel good about that, but he doesn’t. It feels like delaying the inevitable. Colliton keeps mixing up the lines, too, which doesn’t have anything to do with what’s happening with Alex and Dylan, but it’s another place where Dylan feels like there’s a new wall between them.

They aren’t not talking or anything. But they’re not talking much. It feels so awkward every time they’re alone. Dylan spends the day trying to be normal, trying not to reach out and touch him, and he spends his nights when he should be falling asleep imagining ways he could ask Alex to bite him again.

It’s totally insane, there’s no way he can ask his teammate for more bite marks, it would make everything _so_ much worse, but just the thought of it makes hungry heat bloom in Dylan’s belly, and he can’t stop thinking about it. He thinks maybe he could do without the rest of it if he had Alex’s mark on his skin all the time. But there’s no way to ask for that.

They finally get a win against Pittsburgh at home, and Dylan doesn’t get any points but it’s still such a relief. He was starting to feel like maybe he was a curse: like maybe the Blackhawks lost the first eight games he had with them _because_ of him. He still doesn’t know it’s not true.

Kaner corners him after the game, when they’re all smiling from the win. “Hey, you doing anything Wednesday?”

“Uh,” Dylan says. He can’t remember anything he’s doing Wednesday. “Probably not?”

“Good, you guys should come over for dinner,” Kaner says.

“Oh. Uh. Us guys?” Dylan says.

“Yeah, you and Alex,” Kaner says, like it’s obvious.

It kind of is obvious. Dylan was just hoping he was wrong. “Oh. I mean, I don’t know if he’s—you should ask him.”

Kaner gives him a considering look. “Maybe just you for now.”

“Sure,” Dylan says, trying not to sound as relieved as he feels.

Alex is in the living room on Wednesday when Dylan comes out of his room. “Hey,” Alex says. He doesn’t ask where Dylan’s going, but Dylan can tell he wants to know.

“Uh, I’m going over to Kaner and Tazer’s,” Dylan says. “They want me to meet the kids, you know.”

“Oh, cool,” Alex says. Then neither of them knows what to say, which is pretty par for the course for their conversations these days, and Dylan shoves his hands in his pockets.

“So, uh, I’m gonna go,” Dylan says, and Alex says, “Cool,” again, and Dylan goes for the door. It takes basically the whole drive to the Kane-Toews estate before he stops feeling sick to his stomach.

He’s been calling it an estate in his mind half-jokingly, after one of the other guys called it that, but wow, it was not an exaggeration. It’s way out in the suburbs, far enough for it to have a ton of land but not for that land to not be expensive, and Dylan has to drive down this crazy long driveway before he hits the enormous house.

He can smell the wolves already. It makes his blood fizz a little: simultaneously familiar and unnerving. They aren’t his pack. But he can smell Kaner among them, and Tazer’s fainter human scent, and they’re not threatening. Well. Kaner isn’t, anyway.

He rings the bell, and the door opens to reveal Patrick Kane, hockey legend and three-time Stanley Cup champion, with butterfly clips in his hair and a tiny child on his hip.

There are two more tiny children hiding behind his legs. “Oh hey, thanks,” he says as Dylan hands over the bottle of wine he brought, with the sense that maybe he should have brought something else, like a case of Lunchables or something.

“Don’t mind the fashion accessories,” Kaner says as he leads Dylan into the kitchen, through their enormous house. “Eric’s really into fastening things onto other things this week. Jac, how’s the table setting going?”

“We don’t have enough clean glasses,” a girl says, darting glances at Dylan. She’s maybe seven or ten or something, and a wolf. So is the tiny kid on Kaner’s hip. So is one of the two who just ran around the corner. They all smell—not the same. But joined. Pack.

“I bet you know what you can do about that,” Kaner says, and Jac wrinkles her nose and goes to the dishwasher. “Jonny’ll be down in a minute,” Kaner says to Dylan, “he was out shooting pucks with Tricia and Joe. Then you can meet everyone.”

Dylan assumes that by “everyone” he means the kids Dylan’s already seen. But it turns out to be more than that: two other kids Jac’s age, and yet another tiny kid, as well as two kids who are slightly less tiny—the aforementioned Joe and a girl named Violet.

“Tricia and Chris and Jac just had their eighth birthday last week,” Kaner says, and yeah, of course, that makes sense: Dylan remembers when Kaner was outed, just over eight years ago. These are the babies he was carrying.

“Kids, time to sit at the table,” Tazer says, an extra note of authority in his voice that Dylan hadn’t heard before, and the kids scurry into the dining room right away.

Kaner hangs back. “He’s showing off a little for you,” he whispers to Dylan, a grin in his voice. “He’s not always this alpha-ish.”

Dylan has been in a locker room with Tazer for almost a month now. He kind of doubts this is out of the ordinary.

Dinner is so different from any other dinner Dylan’s ever experienced. His family is a pack in a sense, but there are only two of them who are wolves. Here there are seven. And it’s not that the kids don’t misbehave—the littlest ones in particular keep eeling out of their seats and climbing around under the table—but even when they’re being brought back in line, it feels like part of the natural order of things. They’re like a single organism. Like a hockey player, who maybe hasn’t trained his arms and legs to do all the things he wants them to yet, but that doesn’t mean his limbs are in any way less a part of himself.

Dylan’s never felt so much on the outside of anything in his life.

It’s not that they’re not friendly. The younger kids jabber at him during dinner, and Kaner and Tazer keep him in the conversation. After, when the two of them are helping the older kids bus the table, Dylan brings the four-year-olds into the den and they proceed to climb all over him like he’s another physical part of their pack.

The den really is a den, in the wolfiest sense of the word. The floor is covered in this thick carpeting that seems to have some kind of extra padding beneath it, dipping down when Dylan steps on it, and the middle of the room is a huge sofa that’s more like…an enormous round bed, maybe, with a cushioned back curving around half of it. There are big chunky pillows everywhere, on the sofa/bed and on the floor, and when Dylan first sits down he has to pull a rope toy out from under him.

One of the tiny wolves grabs the toy from him and shifts, romping over to the two tiny humans, and the other wolf climbs onto Dylan’s lap. “Daddy and Papa are husbands,” she announces.

“Uh-huh,” he says, picking her up so she can sit on his lap without falling off. “They sure are.”

She pulls on his shirt to pull herself up again. Apparently she wants to stand on his knees. “Where’s your husband?” she asks him.

“I don’t have a husband,” he says. “Not everyone has a husband just because your daddies do.”

“I know,” she says, like he’s super dumb for even suggesting that. “Molly and Kayla have wives. But you have a husband. Right?”

Dylan bites down on the inside of his cheek. “No,” he says. “I don’t.”

“Oh,” she says. Then, “Is that why you’re so sad?”

Dylan’s vision tunnels down. He should say—he should brush it off, she’s just a little kid, she doesn’t even know what she’s smelling—but he can’t make his throat work. He pauses long enough that she gets bored and shifts, wriggling out of the extra-loose outfit all the younger wolves are wearing. “I’m not sad,” he says, but by that point she’s off wrestling with the others.

Kaner comes in after a while with most of the other kids, and they end up forming a puppy pile on the huge couch-slash-bed, some humans and some wolves and some wolves in human form. “Come on, join us,” Kaner says when Dylan just keeps sitting there, looking on. “We’re going to watch—which Pixar movie is it tonight, kids?”

“ _Incredibles_!” one of them shouts, and they start arguing.

Dylan gets to his feet awkwardly and edges his way into the pile. The six-year-old wolf is near him—Joe—and he just flops back against Dylan like he’s an extra pillow and keeps arguing for _Toy Story_. Then a couple of the four-year-olds end up squirming on top of him, and Kaner reaches out a hand and grips his shoulder.

Dylan hasn’t been surrounded by this much warmth of other people since—he doesn’t think he’s ever had quite this experience. Maybe when he was a kid and went to visit other wolf families. Not recently. Nothing even a little like this. It should feel good, but instead it’s making something well up inside of him, this deep overwhelming thing that gets harder to take as the moments pass. He squeezes his eyes shut so that he doesn’t do anything embarrassing.

“Come on, we’ve talked about this,” Kaner says, and Dylan opens his eyes to see Tazer standing there, kind of low-key glowering in their general direction. Tazer huffs and goes around to Kaner’s other side and moves under the kids so that he can press against Kaner.

The way they’re sitting—Tazer with his arm around Kaner’s shoulder, their heads close—Dylan’s sat with Alex like that. Not in months. But the memory of it is in his body, running up and down his limbs.

They watch _Wall-E._ Dylan stays buried in Kane-Toewses, and it’s probably good for him: he hasn’t been getting enough touch lately. But he hardly watches any of the movie, too busy pressing his lips together to keep from crying out.

Kaner walks him to the door after the movie’s over and the kids are on their way to bed. “Hey, I wanted to ask,” he says. “I know it’s none of my business. But is everything going okay with Alex?”

Dylan flushes, like, all over his body. “What?” he says. “I mean, yes. It’s fine.” Why is Kaner asking? What does he know?

“I mean, I assume you’re happy to be here,” Kaner says. “But I know it can be a big adjustment, and I just wanted to check, you know.”

“Oh, yeah,” Dylan says. “It’s, um, definitely. Different. But good.”

“You should feel free to come over if it’s ever not,” Kaner says. “Or if you just want to hang. I know Tricia and Joe would love some more hockey buddies. Really—we’d love to have you. We won’t even use you for free babysitting. Much.”

Kaner’s grinning, joking a little at the end there, but the offer is sincere. Dylan can tell. He feels it well up again: that urge to cry, to let out something that’s clawing at his insides.

He doesn’t think it would actually help. It would just make him feel pathetic. “Thanks,” he says, “I really appreciate it,” as steadily as he can, and he shuts himself into his car and takes like fifteen deep breaths before he starts the drive back to the city.

It’s dark and quiet when he lets himself back into Alex’s place. It smells so—warm. Familiar. Comforting. Dylan stops in the foyer and leans against the wall, looking at the shadowy living room and the little bit of kitchen counter he can see, all the little scraps of a home like the one he just glimpsed, one that will never actually be his to share.

He might lose the fight against his own reactions later that night. But he’s in the shower, so the tears on his cheeks don’t really count.

***

The full moon happens a few days later. Dylan feels the pull a few days in advance, and it makes him want to sit down next to Alex on the couch and rub his face all over him.

To be fair, he usually wants that. But it’s extra hard to resist now.

He runs alone on the night of the moon, in a wolf run he finds a little ways out. There’s another alpha already there, but Dylan gives her a wide berth, and he gets through it okay. He doesn’t get as much energy from the moon as he usually does, though, and the December air feels colder than he expected, even through his thick coat of fur. He ends up heading home earlier than usual, even though the moon is still high in the sky.

Alex’s twenty-first birthday is the next night. They have a game against the Preds at home, which they win, and the whole team goes out after to celebrate Alex finally being able to drink. “I mean, in your stupid country,” Dylan says to him after a couple of shots, and Alex laughs, his face full of happiness, all that brightness spilling out onto Dylan like it used to—and then it’s like he remembers, and he pulls it all back in, his smile dimming and his face turning away.

Dylan looks down at his drink and breathes, in and out, in and out. He can do this.

He puts some distance between them as soon as he can. The crowd is thick around Alex, but he pushes his way through it, stumbling out of the din and heading to the back of the bar near the bathrooms. He ends up around the corner, by a dingy backroom door, arm wrapped around his stomach to try to hold off the chills.

It’s better this way. Alex is not his, and Alex is not going to be his, and that means it’s better if they don’t—do that kind of thing. Laugh together. Smile in the way that makes Dylan’s heart squeeze out like a tube of toothpaste. It’s better; it’s better.

He tells himself that over and over but it doesn’t quite feel true. It can’t be better when Alex’s face is shuttered like that. It can’t be better when it feels like Dylan’s lungs are made of broken glass, like every breath drags and scrapes against them.

Maybe—is there anything Dylan can do to make it actually better? He doesn’t know. He’s not sure he can do it without making it hurt more later. But it already hurts now. It hurts too much for him not to try something.

He goes home early from the party and falls asleep eventually, exhaustion dragging him under. When he wakes up and comes out of his room in the morning, Alex is in the living room, lying on the couch with a pillow over his face.

Dylan backs up quietly. He—maybe he shouldn’t try anything. But he can’t take this anymore.

He goes to the bathroom and gets a glass of water and the thing of aspirin. Then he goes back out and sits in the chair next to the couch.

“Um,” he says, and it takes a moment, but Alex takes the pillow off his face. He looks terrible, eyes squinting and bloodshot, and Dylan thinks maybe this isn’t a good time for it—but he can’t wait. And he’s already sort of started. “I brought you something.”

He holds up the water and aspirin. Alex looks surprised. “Thanks, man,” he says, his voice raspy. Dylan wonders if—last night, maybe there was someone who—

No. It’s none of his business. He could probably smell Alex to find out, but he’s not going to.

Alex takes the water and swallows the pills. Dylan shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “Uh, I was thinking,” Dylan says. “Maybe we could, uh. Is there a chance that maybe we could, like—be cool again?”

Alex looks at him for a long moment. Dylan can’t read his look at all: mostly he’s just squinting. Finally he says, “Yeah. Yeah, we can give that a shot.”

“Awesome,” Dylan says, letting out a relieved breath.

Alex kind of smiles at him. Then he winces, like that was too much movement.

“Do you want me to, uh.” Dylan sits on his hands. He shouldn’t be saying this. But—“Do you want, like, a head massage?”

He’s not sure what’s wrong with him. For one terrible long frozen moment Alex just looks at him. Then he says, “Uh, yeah. That would be great, actually.”

Alex lies back down on the couch. Dylan comes and sits at his hip, closer than he probably should be but also as far as he can be without falling off the couch. Alex has his eyes closed, just faint lines of tension on his face, and Dylan puts his hands to Alex’s temple and watches the lines smooth out, Alex letting out a breath.

It feels so good to have his hands on Alex. To be making Alex feel better. Dylan strokes his fingers slowly over Alex’s brow and feels like he’s giving him something: not everything he’d like to give him. But a lot. What he needs right now.

He’s so lucky, in some ways. He doesn’t get to have Alex be his. But he gets to be in his life right now. He gets to have Alex trust him, regardless of whatever shit happened between them, gets to have Alex place himself under his hands.

Alex doesn’t even smell like anyone else. Dylan feels guilty for noticing, but he can’t help it. It’s possible Alex showered it off, but Dylan doesn’t think so: he still smells a little like stale sweat and alcohol, like he hasn’t showered since the bar. Dylan probably shouldn’t like that scent. But it smells real, smells like Alex’s life, and Dylan wants to lick it off of him.

He pushes that down. He’s already working his fingers into Alex’s hairline, his scalp; he’s already so lucky. It’s okay if he doesn’t get more than this. Dylan will make it be okay.


	9. Chapter 9

Dylan has a good game the night before Christmas Eve, a goal and two assists, two of those points with Alex. It breaks his five-game point drought and means he’s a little less anxious about getting sent down before he flies home for Christmas.

It still hasn’t been that stellar a month, though. Not enough to justify his dad saying, “Looking good with that new team of yours,” when he picks him up from the airport.

“Seven points in fourteen games, that’s not that great,” Dylan says. And three of those points were in yesterday’s game—you stop counting before that, it’s only four points in thirteen games. That’s not enough for a guarantee.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” his dad says, and Dylan doesn’t want to talk about this. He just wants to have Christmas with his family and not think about his failures for a while.

He doesn’t expect to miss Alex. It’s only three days. But there’s a palpable ache in his chest even on the drive from the airport to the house. It’s the kind of ache he hasn’t felt in a while: there were plenty of times this past month when it hurt that he wasn’t touching Alex, but at least Alex was there. This is an ache of absence. Dylan forgot what that felt like.

It’s not as bad as the summer, because Dylan can tell himself that it’s only three days. But still, by the end of the first day Dylan’s so sick to his stomach he begs off dinner.

“Are you coming down with something?” his mom asks, pressing her hand to his forehead. “You don’t feel warm.”

Dylan doesn’t feel warm at all. But fevers give you chills, right? “I don’t know, maybe a bug?”

“Yeah.” She’s frowning at him. “I don’t know, you smell a little…” She shakes her head. “Get some rest tonight.”

“I will,” Dylan says, and he goes to bed while the rest of the family is watching _A Christmas Story_.

He’s not feeling any better the next morning, though he tries to cover for it while they open presents. Everyone else is happy and excited, thanking each other for their gifts; Dylan watches it and feels totally on the outside. “What, don’t you like it?” Matt asks when Dylan opens his present, a subscription to the cheese of the month club.

“No, are you kidding, it’s the best,” Dylan says, and tries to put more energy into his voice. He can’t just—be like this. He has to be able to be normal for three days put together. But it feels like he’s climbing up a slope that keeps crumbling away beneath him.

He gets a snap from Alex a little later in the morning: a picture of Ralph wearing a red plaid coat. It’s basically the cutest thing Dylan’s ever seen and Dylan wants so badly to be there with them he has to bend over and put his hands on his knees and just breathe for a minute.

At least he’s alone in his room, so no one sees. He gets himself up after a minute, goes to click his screen off—but instead, before he can tell himself not to, he opens the phone app and presses call.

Alex answers with a, “Hey!” happy but vaguely surprised.

_Stupid, stupid._ Dylan’s supposed to be being chill about shit. “Hey, just had to see that coat in motion,” he says, hoping he doesn’t sound like as much of an idiot as he feels.

Alex laughs, and switches them to FaceTime. Then Dylan’s looking at Ralph’s face, panting up at the phone and not quite focusing on the screen. “He says he misses you,” Alex says.

It’s so good just to hear Alex’s voice, even after a day and a half. Like getting a full lungful of air. “I miss him too,” Dylan says.

“Walks just aren’t as good without your Uncle Dylan, are they?” Alex says to Ralph, and then he flips the camera and Dylan gets to see him. “I’m pretty sure he hates the coat, actually.”

Alex’s face looks dumb and distorted by the iPhone camera and Dylan still wants to look at him forever. “He needs to learn to appreciate a good plaid,” Dylan says.

“Mm, you’ll have to work on his education,” Alex says.

They stay on the phone for a while. Dylan ends up lying on his bed, knees pulled up to his chest, hugging them against the gaping emptiness while they talk about presents and upcoming games and other normal shit. He’s not at all ready to hang up when they do, but Alex’s family is going on some kind of Christmas Day outing and they’ve been talking for forty-five minutes and Dylan isn’t that ridiculous.

He does actually feel a little better when he gets off the phone. Not totally stable, but like he can get through the next day. He’s even grinning a little as he leaves his room. And then he’s brought up short by his mom standing in the hall.

The grin falls off his face. She’s standing in front of the linen closet, like she was getting sheets or whatever, but she’s not doing anything and it’s obvious that she was listening to at least some of that. The walls in their house aren’t so thick that a wolf can’t hear a conversation through them.

“Did you bond with Alex?” she asks.

Dylan actually takes a step back. “Wh-what?”

“Did you have sex with him?” she asks, coming closer.

Dylan’s mouth is open and he can’t find any words. “Yes,” he says finally. “But—that’s not—”

“Did you knot him?” she asks, her voice urgent.

“Mom. No,” he says. “I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t do that.”

She lets out a breath, her shoulders going down. “Okay. Sorry,” she says. “I just, there’s been something in your scent for a while now, and I thought, it would explain a lot—”

“I didn’t.” Dylan’s cheeks are burning hot.

“You know there are other ways to start a bond,” she says.

Dylan knows. He got the talk when he turned twelve: how not to bond with someone as an alpha. Don’t knot them. Don’t bite them. Don’t have unprotected sex. Don’t have _lots_ of sex, like five times a day for a week. He would never do any of that.

“Incomplete bonds can be dangerous,” she says. “If you’ve started something, and the two of you aren’t deepening it—”

“I haven’t,” he says. “I haven’t done any of that.”

“Are you sure?” she says. “Because—”

“I’m pretty sure I would know,” he says.

“All right,” she says, and Dylan wonders if he can leave yet—if he can go back into his room and crawl under the covers now and pretend none of this ever happened.

“But you know,” she says, “if you ever wanted to bond with him…”

“ _Mom,_ ” he says, desperately wanting to be in any conversation but this one.

“I’m just saying, you two seem to have a strong connection,” she says. “You know your father and I would be—”

“Yeah, I’m gonna—yeah,” he says, turning away. “I’ll think about it.” And then he gets out of there as fast as he possibly can.

He’s not planning to think about it. But he ends up thinking about it anyway: not about bonding with Alex—that’s the kind of thing he can’t think about if he doesn’t want to end up bent over his own knees, hurting too much to stand—but about her idea, that they’d bonded already.

He almost wants it to be true. He wants it the way he wants to reach out and touch Alex every time they’re in the same room; the way he wants to move to be in the same room when he’s not. He wants it the way he can’t help but want everything with Alex, even when he knows it might destroy him.

Dylan hasn’t knotted Alex. They had sex three times over a year and a half. That’s not enough to make a bond. And even if it were, even if Dylan had knotted him and bitten him and all the rest—but it’s not even worth thinking about. It’s been weeks since the last time they had sex. Dylan’s pretty sure he’d have noticed by now, if they’d accidentally created a bond.

***

He flies back to Chicago the day after Christmas. He counts the hours until he’s back, and then the minutes, and then he’s in a cab heading toward Alex’s apartment. Then he finally comes through the door and breathes in deep and feels things click back into place.

Alex is in the kitchen. Dylan knows that before he speaks. “Whaddja bring me?” he calls out to Dylan.

“Two weeks’ worth of clean laundry,” Dylan says, letting his duffel thud to the ground and heading into the kitchen. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

Alex makes a face. “I don’t know, is it going to fit me?” he asks, and Dylan could kiss him. He could walk up to Alex and slide his hands around his waist and kiss him. And then they’d have sex, and it would be mind-meltingly hot, and things would be awkward and stilted for another month—or they’d keep doing it, and it would be perfect and wonderful and would shatter Dylan into a million pieces when it ended.

He slides a box across the table at Alex. “You can have this instead.”

Alex turns it over. Dylan wasn’t going to get him anything. But then he was in the dumb airport store and he thought about having something to give to Alex and then he couldn’t resist. “Aw. Maple candy,” Alex says. “You sure you’re not trying to make me Canadian?”

“You should be so lucky,” Dylan says, and looks away from Alex’s mouth as he bites into the first piece.

***

December winds to a close, and Dylan keeps not getting sent down. He even gets some points in the two games after Christmas, two assists per game.

That’s almost more dangerous than not scoring, because it lets him start to hope. He’s learned what happens when he hopes.

They fly to Notre Dame for the Winter Classic just before New Year’s. No celebration on New Year’s Eve for them, but the team sets them up in a lounge at the hotel with hors-d’oeuvres and sparkling cider. Dylan grouses with the other guys about it, but secretly he has nothing to complain about. Alex is there, next to him, looking sharp in his suit, cheeks as flushed as if there were champagne in his glass.

Dylan’s needs are really pathetically simple.

2019 starts. They lose the Winter Classic, and then they lose in OT against the Isles, and win against the Pens, and lose to Calgary. Dylan has a solitary goal in that stretch.

It’s hard to live with the varying levels of panic that ebb and flow in his chest. Part of him knows it would be better to be sent down soon, if it’s going to happen—but he also can’t bear the idea of it. Flinches every time his phone rings, for fear it’ll be Stan Bowman.

He feels like everyone else can see it, too, like he has a target on his back. Every time they’re down during a game he finds himself hunching his shoulders, ducking his head anytime anyone starts to talk to him.

They’re down against Calgary when Matt Tkachuk does actually say something to him. There’s a stoppage of play in the second, and Chucky taps his stick against Dylan’s skate. “Hey Stromer,” he says. “Whatcha doin’ to my man Brinksy?”

“Huh?” Dylan says, too startled to chirp back. It wasn’t even a chirp. It was a—“What do you mean, what am I doing to him?”

Play starts again before Chucky can answer. But Dylan keeps thinking about the question later. He doesn’t _think_ he’s doing anything to Alex—he’s not even sleeping with him, right now. He can’t imagine what Tkachuck means.

Unless he thinks Dylan is holding Alex back somehow.

That thought hits Dylan as he’s climbing over the boards for another shift, and his skate slips a little and he almost wipes out onto the ice. He pulls himself together, but the thought stays: is he holding Alex back?

Maybe—maybe in hockey. Alex hasn’t been playing badly or anything since Dylan got here—he’s at almost a point per game—but maybe he’s not as good as he was before Dylan got there. Maybe Dylan just can’t tell because he doesn’t want it to be true.

Maybe Dylan needs to get his failure self out of Alex’s life.

He doesn’t…he doesn’t really think that. But it’s a bad week for believing good things about himself: he doesn’t score in that game, or the next game, or the one after that, and he can’t slump right now, not when the team is losing and they’ll be looking to mix things up. And that thought about Alex keeps popping up in his head. He leaves their loss against Vegas with his shoulders up, expecting at any minute to hear Stan’s voice calling him into his office. Or maybe it’ll happen before their flight tomorrow, or after the next game or the next when Dylan doesn’t do any better—

“Hey!” someone calls, and Dylan jumps, expecting someone from the front office, but it’s just Alex, coming down the hall after him. “What, did you want to drive yourself home?”

“Hey, I can drive,” Dylan says.

“Not unless you lifted my keys, and you’re not _that_ good with your hands,” Alex says. Then, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Nothing,” Dylan says automatically.

Alex keeps looking at him. Shit, Dylan had forgotten about this: how Alex could just be quiet, and wait, and not push, and it would make Dylan tell him everything.

“I haven’t been playing too good,” he mumbles as they go through the doors to the parking garage.

“What are you talking about? You’re playing fine,” Alex says. “You have a bunch of goals.”

“Five,” Dylan says.

“And six assists,” Alex says, which, it’s kind of embarrassing to have him know Dylan’s stats. Dylan doesn’t want anyone to know his stats, the way they are right now.

“Okay, but you have, what, twenty-three goals?” Dylan says. “Forty points?”

“Only thirty-eight,” Alex says. “And I have like twenty games on you.”

It’s true that Dylan could be counting the twenty games he played with the Coyotes. In which case he has a total of seventeen points. Less than half of what Alex has. And he knows he doesn’t have to be as good as Alex, but— 

“Are you freaking out?” Alex asks.

“No,” Dylan lies, and Alex gives him a look like he doesn’t believe it, but they’re getting in the car and Dylan has an excuse not to look at him.

Alex navigates them out of the garage, and then they’re on the streets, quiet in comparison to rush hour but still full of traffic. Dylan looks out the window at the passing cars and hopes they’re done with the topic. He doesn’t want to have to account for his failure to perform after Juniors. Whatever made him good back then, it’s not working anymore—and maybe what made him good back then really was Alex. Maybe his talent was rubbing off on Dylan somehow, only it’s stopped working and now maybe it’ll go in the other direction. Maybe that’s what Chucky meant.

He’s staring out the window at the streets sliding by, and he’s startled when he feels a touch on his hand. Alex is still driving, one hand on the steering wheel, but the other is wrapping around Dylan’s and lacing their fingers together.

Dylan’s heart starts beating faster. He’s pretty sure this isn’t allowed. He’s pretty sure this is crossing all sorts of lines, lines they said they wouldn’t—

“Otters hold hands,” Alex says, still looking at the road ahead.

Dylan bites his lip hard. Otters hold hands. It’s a reason, an excuse, permission to have this thing that feels like the only thread of stability in the world right now.

He closes his eyes and lets the contact flow through him.

Alex feels so close. Closer than he has been since—since they had sex. Since that last night in Michigan, really, when Alex pressed against him and opened his mouth with kisses. It feels like Alex is really here with him, like he’s really Dylan’s to grasp.

Dylan lets himself imagine it’s true. Just for a few minutes, just for the length of the car ride. He holds onto Alex’s hand and lets himself imagine that nothing and nobody will pull them apart.

***

They go to New Jersey, and Dylan has two assists in an epic 5-8 loss. He’s not sure how to feel about that. He probably won’t get sent down right after hitting the score sheet twice like that—but then, they did lose.

It’s just…what are they waiting for? Dylan’s been up for almost two months now. He’s getting too attached: to his teammates, to the city, to living with Alex. Mostly that last one. The longer this lasts, the more it’s going to suck when it falls apart.

He and Alex have been spending more time together, too. Kaner even says something about it: “Glad the two of you are doing better,” to Dylan in the locker room after a practice where Dylan let himself get a little lost in goofing around together. They are doing better. That—that just makes it harder.

They have three days between games in the New York area. Dylan’s rooming with Pearls, which should be a good time to put some space between him and Alex, but also he and Alex keep hanging out. Alex ends up in his room on their morning off, flopped over his bed while they look up places to go in NYC, and then they go out with some of the other guys to sight-see and shop. There are a bunch of them, all in a big group, but Dylan keeps finding himself next to Alex. Keeps drifting over like he’s magnetized, and Alex doesn’t drift away. Alex stays. Dylan stands elbow-to-elbow with him at the top of the Empire State Building and feels the city tilt dizzily around them.

It’s painful to separate from him when they go back to the hotel, and a little bit of a relief. Dylan takes a shower before they all go out that night, and he jerks off, imagining all those moments of maybe-almost resolving into something real, into Alex in the shower with him pressing their soap-slick bodies together. He comes so hard he gets dizzy.

He’s dazed from the orgasm when he gets out of the shower. Pearls has already gone downstairs, so Dylan doesn’t think twice before walking out of the bathroom naked. He’s heading for his suitcase, his mind still full of those images, when he hears an, “Oh.”

His head snaps up. Alex is standing between the beds, frozen, staring at Dylan’s chest. Staring—maybe lower than that.

Dylan freezes, too. He feels like he should go back into the bathroom, grab a towel—but they see each other naked on a daily basis. This just feels different because—because he didn’t expect Alex to be there, because they’ve hooked up before, because he just got off to the idea of Alex pressed against him. Because they’re in a hotel room, alone, and there’s a bed—

“Sorry,” Alex says, turning away. His face is pink. “Pearls gave me his key so I could—”

“No, no, it’s fine. Sorry. I’m—almost ready,” Dylan says, rummaging through his bag for the absolute first thing he can throw on. “Yeah, this is good,” he says, pulling on jeans and a random shirt. “You wanna go?”

He grabs his wallet and shoves his feet into his shoes and holds the door for Alex, hair still soaking wet. It drips on his neck in the elevator. He hopes Alex doesn’t notice.

They meet the other guys in the lobby, and then Dylan can relax a little. But he can’t quite get past it as they go to the club that Kunitz suggested. It’s in his head, tripping him up every time he tries to talk like a normal person. Alex in his hotel room. Alex close and maybe maybe maybe wanting him.

He didn’t smell like desire. But Alex never does, really, not that Dylan can tell. And they’ve hooked up before, and Alex was into it, so probably—probably.

Alex is over near the bar with Kahun, talking to a couple of girls, and what if Dylan went up to him? Pulled him away, made it clear—Alex would probably leave with him. Go back to the hotel early and tell Pearls he’s hooking up and step in close and—

Dylan swallows down the flood of heat and the burst of panic. He can’t. He wouldn’t survive that. It might not literally kill him, but it would come really fucking close.

He can’t…he can’t go on like this.

He’s thought that before. On the plane, in the airport, coming back from Michigan, right before he cut off contact. That was—his insides are seizing up just thinking about it. Cold fingers clenching tight. He can’t let it get that bad. Will do a lot to keep it from getting that bad.

Maybe…maybe if he just pulls back a little. Maybe it he reminds himself of the things he should already know.

He knows what he needs to do. He even thinks he can bring himself to do it. As soon as they’re back in Chicago.

They fly back late at night after losing against the Rangers. They sleep in after the flight and go to afternoon practice, and then Alex orders them takeout and they eat it at the kitchen island, fending off Ralph’s attempts to steal from them and talking about facing the Caps in a couple of days. Then Alex gets up to put his plate in the sink and Dylan says, “Hey. Um. You know you can, like, hook up with other people while I’m living here, right?”

Alex stops, partway to the sink. “Excuse me?”

“I mean.” Fuck, that came out all wrong. Dylan digs his fingers into his thighs, hard, harder. His heart is beating so hard. He just has to not think about it: about Alex’s skin scented like someone else. It’s what he needs, if he’s going to get through this. And he just has to remember that Alex deserves—

“Just,” he says. His voice is even almost steady. “If you’re holding off because you think it’ll be awkward if you, like, bring people over here or whatever. I wanted to make sure you knew you could do that.”

There’s silence for a long time. Then Alex finishes his move toward the sink, puts the plate in, and there’s more silence. Then: “Okay,” Alex says. “Okay, I will.”

“Good,” Dylan says. He’s breathing really hard, even though he’s not moving. He tries to get off his stool, but he feels really lightheaded, has to put a hand on the counter to steady himself. The world is disappearing under a wash of white. “Yeah, so I’m gonna,” he says, and goes out into the hall, and puts on his shoes and coat, and grabs his wallet, and leaves.

***

He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know anyone else in Chicago well enough to crash with them right now, not when he’s like this. They would ask questions, and he can’t. He doesn’t even know the answers.

He thought…he thought he could handle this. He was wrong. He can barely even unlock his phone right now, and this is what he wanted but fuck he did not know it would be like this.

He opens his Uber app, and he’s typing in the Kane-Toews address before he can think better of it. Then he stands and waits and shakes until a car comes up and takes him out of there.

It’s after eight when the car pulls up in front of their mansion. There are still lights on in the windows, and Dylan hears a shriek and the voices of the kids.

He’s having some trouble as he stands on the steps. Things are kind of blurring before him, coming in and out of focus. He can do this, though. Just has to make it a little while longer.

The door opens after he rings the bell, this woman who’s in maybe her early thirties. “Hi,” she says, and then, “Oh. Are you all—”

“Is Kaner here?” Dylan asks. His voice cracks. “I mean, uh, Patrick. Kane.”

“I’ll go see if he can come down,” she says, and lets him into a little sunporch-type area near the door.

Dylan sinks into a seat and breathes, and after a couple of minutes the door opens and someone comes in who’s not Kaner. “Hey,” Tazer says. “Sorry, Pat got caught up in a bedtime emergency.” He sits down on the other sofa across from Dylan. “What’s up?”

This isn’t what Dylan wanted at all. He’s never felt like Tazer liked him much. He hasn’t caught as many glares lately, but Tazer’s never been friendly the way Kaner has. Dylan was kind of hoping—would never say it out loud, especially now that he’s not getting it, but he was hoping—for Kaner’s arms around him, another wolf just holding him for a little while. Someplace it felt almost safe to fall apart. But also he’s been holding things off for too long and he can feel himself crumbling against his will.

“I fucked up,” he says, and then he’s stuffing his fist in his mouth and covering his face and bending over to brace against everything that shudders through him.

For a long minute it’s just him and the inside of his head and the desperate struggle not to make more sound than he has to. Then he startles at a touch on his back: Tazer’s hand.

“So,” Tazer says, “Patrick’s definitely better at the whole comforting thing than I am. But if you want to tell me. I’ll listen.”

And Dylan—Dylan starts talking. Doesn’t quite intend to, but it comes pouring out of him, before he can think about things like how maybe he shouldn’t be outing Alex like this, how maybe Tazer doesn’t know. That’s what happens when you fall apart, he guesses. You do all sorts of dumb things you shouldn’t be doing.

“And I thought I could handle it,” he says when he gets to the end of the story. He left out a lot of it but he got the main points in there. “I thought it would help if I knew he was—but I can’t. I just—he’s gonna—and I can’t—”

He cuts himself off. He’s still breathing hard, leaning over, elbows on his knees.

“Okay,” Tazer says slowly. “Maybe I’m missing something here. But why the fuck did you tell your bondmate you want him to sleep with other people?”

Dylan jerks up, dislodging Tazer’s hand. “What the fuck?”

“Just saying,” Tazer says. “It doesn’t sound like the best—”

“He’s not my bondmate,” Dylan says.

“Oh.” Tazer raises an eyebrow. “You’re not—”

“No.” Dylan balls up a fist on his knee. It hurts just to get the word out. “What made you think we were—”

“Sorry, I must have misunderstood.” Tazer’s frowning. “I thought Pat said—but, okay. You’re not bondmates. What made you tell your boyfriend to sleep with other people?”

“He’s not my—” Dylan says, and has to turn his head, biting down on his lip. He’s not gonna fall apart again. More. Whatever. “We’re not together.”

“You’re—what. Are you fucking serious?” Tazer says.

Dylan doesn’t respond. He doesn’t feel like that deserves an answer. If they were together, would he be—yeah. Obviously they’re not.

“Does he not want to be?” Tazer asks, like he’s honestly baffled.

“He wants—it doesn’t matter what he wants,” Dylan says. “I mean, I don’t think he—but we can’t be together. Not if I’m gonna be—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence. “If you’re gonna be what?” Tazer asks finally.

Dylan clenches and opens his hands on his knees. “I can’t do it again,” he says quietly. “What happened in Arizona.”

“What, playing for the A?” Tazer says, like it’s not a big deal.

“No,” Dylan says. “The—” He doesn’t have words for it. “It was so bad. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t fucking breathe. I was barely getting through the—I can’t—I can’t do that again.”

“And…you think that will happen if you get together with Alex?” Tazer says, brow furrowed in confusion.

“No. I think if we get together, it’ll be worse,” Dylan says.

“Okay,” Tazer says slowly. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

This is torture. Dylan drops his head into his hands. “We’re not gonna stay together,” he says. He can’t believe Tazer is making him say this. “Because I’m not—I mean, look, we both know it.”

“You both know what?”

“We. We both know it.” Dylan gestures between the two of them. “We both know I’m not here for good.”

“What?” Tazer says.

“I’m gonna be sent down,” Dylan says. “And I can’t—I can’t do that again. Leaving.”

There’s a pause. “Okay, setting aside that last part for a minute,” Tazer says, a dry note in his voice, “it seems like it’s already pretty bad now. Even though you’re not together.”

“It’s been worse,” Dylan says, though it’s hard to imagine it right now. He remembers worse. He remembers feeling like he was on the verge of worse still.

“Yeah, okay. Look, I’m not the world’s expert on this or anything,” Tazer says, “but this sounds like a bond.”

“It’s not,” Dylan says.

“You hurt when you’re not with him?” Tazer says. “Not like you really wish he was there or whatever, but like your whole body physically hurts. For hours. For days.”

Dylan swallows. “Yeah.” He feels like there hasn’t been a day he _hasn’t_ hurt, in recent memory, except when Alex has been touching him. “But that’s just me. I can’t—”

“Have you been shaking?” Tazer asks.

Dylan pauses. “I mean, everyone kind of—”

“Like, full-body,” Tazer says. “Like you’re inside a walk-in freezer, and you’re freezing cold and you’ll never be warm again, and you feel like maybe you’re going to die for a few hours until it stops and then your muscles ache like you just played a full sixty minutes until you finally start to feel better and then it starts all over again.”

Dylan’s silent. His heart is beating hard. “But,” he says finally. “But I haven’t—I mean, there are things you’re supposed to do, to make a bond. I haven’t done them.”

“Patrick and I bonded without having sex at all,” Tazer says.

Dylan jerks his head around in surprise. Tazer just stares back at him, in the dim light of the sunporch. His scent is steady, overlaid with the scents of his children and all the little normal-life food and place scents, but running through it all, stronger than anything else, the scent of him-and-Kaner. The bond. It’s so strong Dylan feels like non-wolves should be able to smell it.

“That’s not possible,” Dylan says.

“I swear, wolf education on this continent is a fucking joke,” Tazer says. “You probably didn’t even watch our video about it, did you?”

“Um,” Dylan says. He doesn’t know what video Tazer’s talking about. “I just, I really don’t think—”

“The point is,” Tazer says, talking over him, “if you’re feeling bond symptoms, Alex is too. Even if he’s not a wolf,” he says, over Dylan’s next objection. “Even if you haven’t had sex with him. If you’re feeling it, he’s feeling it. _Trust_ me, I fucking _know._ ”

“I, uh,” Dylan says. He runs his fingers over his knees. “I might have had sex with him.”

“Yeah, and tell me again how you’re not bonded,” Tazer says.

Adrenaline is coursing through Dylan’s limbs. “But I would know,” he says. “There would be this connection, like you hear about, like—”

“So the bond hasn’t settled yet,” Tazer says. “That just makes it worse, that you’ve let it drag on this long. How long has it been?”

Dylan doesn’t want to answer. Doesn’t want to think about it. “Um,” he says. His mouth tastes like sharp, hot metal. “But. What do I—do?”

“Have you thought about, I don’t know,” Tazer says, voice dry enough to towel off with, “actually completing the bond with him?”

“He wouldn’t want to,” Dylan says.

“Why the fuck not?” Tazer says.

He sounds like he actually doesn’t know. Dylan doesn’t know how he can explain it to him, if it isn’t obvious. “Why would he?”

“I don’t know, because he’s already half-bonded to you?” Tazer says. “Pretty sure that means he likes you.”

“But I’m,” Dylan says, and he can’t quite bring himself to finish the sentence. “You know. It’s why you guys could trade for me like that. Because I’m.”

“Not living up to your potential?” Tazer asks, and when Dylan gives a stilted nod: “Fuck that.” It’s his alpha voice, and it jerks on something inside Dylan even though he doesn’t want it to. “Fuck them, if they say that. You were fucking brilliant in Junior. You’re going to be brilliant with us.”

“You don’t know that,” Dylan says. “I could play in Juniors, so what, I can’t play in the fucking NH—”

“Yeah, for the _Coyotes_ , maybe,” Tazer says. “You’ve been playing fine for us.”

“Not great,” Dylan says. “Not third-draft-pick great. And better when—” It’s hard to admit it, even when it’s obvious to anyone with eyes. “Better when I’m with Alex.”

“So you need good people to play well with,” Tazer says. “So what?”

“I shouldn’t need that,” Dylan says. “Not if I were really a good player.”

“I need it,” Tazer says. “You think I’ve been playing well the past two years? You think I play my best when I’m not on a line with Patrick?”

Dylan isn’t gonna answer that. He’s not gonna insult his team captain. Especially when said captain is Jonathan Toews. But—

“Hockey’s a team sport,” Tazer says. “Chemistry matters. Linemates matter. No shame in only playing well when you’re with good people.”

Dylan wants to agree. Feels like it’s too much of a cop-out. Wants the cop-out, too badly to believe it’s something he can have.

“Anyway,” Tazer says. “What makes you think Alex wants you to be a great hockey player?”

“It doesn’t matter what he wants,” Dylan says. “If I get sent down—”

“You’re not getting sent down,” Tazer says, like he can make it true just by saying it. Like it’s obvious. “But I don’t think that’s your real problem anyway. You need to stop being an idiot about this.”

“But—”

“What if Alex were the one who got sent to the AHL?” Tazer asks. “Or he never even got drafted and went to college or had some other job. Would you not want him?”

Dylan’s first reaction is to say that Alex would never get sent down. But he stops and actually thinks about it: an Alex who didn’t play hockey. Who maybe followed the game and knew stats and whatever, but he and Dylan never got to be on the ice together and experience that electric chemistry of passing to each other and feeling the pass turn into a goal. An Alex who was just the brightness of his smile, and the squareness of his shoulders under his favorite sweater, and the way his face melts when he’s looking at Ralph. The way he’s always there for Dylan—the way he’ll stand silently until Dylan’s ready to tell him something and then accept whatever Dylan has to say, and stick around anyway. The Alex who took Dylan’s hand in the car a couple of weeks ago and held it and made Dylan feel safe for the first time in weeks.

“I would—yeah,” he says, feeling the words spark in his stomach. It feels like so much to say it out loud: he half-wants to curl over the feeling and block it from sight. “I would still. Want him.”

“So,” Tazer says, like that’s it.

“Okay, but—” That can’t be it. Dylan knows that’s not it. If that’s it, why are they not together? “It’s easy for you. You and Kaner are both—”

“You think Kaner and I are going to be playing professional-level hockey forever?” Tazer asks. “You think he’s going to dump me when I start to suck?”

“Obviously not,” Dylan says. “But—”

“Why are you starting to suck?” Kaner asks, coming through the door onto the sun porch. “Because I hate to break it to you, babe, but—oh, hey,” he says, probably noticing what Dylan looks like right now.

Tazer holds out a hand to him, and Kaner comes up behind him, putting his hands on Tazer’s shoulders. “So, interesting thing I just learned,” Tazer says. “Did you know Stromer and the Cat aren’t bonded?”

“What?” Kaner says. “Of course they are.”

“Nope,” Tazer says.

“But.” Kaner inhales, sniffing the air. “If they’re not bonded, then—”

Dylan twists his hands together, tight enough to ache. “I think I should probably go home now,” he says.

***

Kaner drives him back to Alex’s. He says some stuff on the way back, but Dylan can’t really take it in. He’s having trouble focusing any of his senses. It’s like now that he knows there’s some kind of bond in place—partial, unsettled, whatever it is—he can’t draw breath properly until he sees Alex again. He knows he’s taking in air, can hear the loud rasp of it filling his ears, but it’s like it isn’t reaching anywhere that matters.

He’s going to have to talk to Alex. He’s going to have to own up to—to whatever’s been happening between them the past two years. He’s not sure he’ll survive the conversation. But if Tazer’s right, if Alex is feeling the symptoms too, if Dylan’s been doing that to him—

Or if he hasn’t. If he tells Dylan to leave.

“Call us if you need a place to stay tonight,” Kaner says, and Dylan nods dumbly.

The apartment is silent when he goes inside on numb legs. Alex is there. Dylan can smell it. Dylan can always smell it. He hasn’t had a single day over the past year and a half when he hasn’t strained against the pull of that knowledge—when he hasn’t had to fight not to throw himself at Alex so hard he breaks something. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen in this conversation, but being able to give in to that pull, to be honest even for the length of a conversation, even if it all falls apart—it almost makes it worth it.

Alex’s door is shut. Dylan knocks.

It takes a long time for Alex to answer. Long enough that Dylan thinks maybe he isn’t going to. But finally the door opens and Alex is standing there, rumpled and soft-looking and tense. “What,” he says.

Dylan stares at him. How did he not realize, the past year and a half, what having Alex in front of him did to him? It’s like a chemical reaction, everything changing in an instant. The difference between the moment before a goal is scored and the moment when the puck slides into the net. He’s such an idiot. He can’t—he can’t risk losing this.

“Alex,” he says. His voice is scraping, blades over ice. He needs to be strong, needs to apologize, needs to not collapse under this. “Alex, I fucked up.”

Alex’s expression changes. “What?”

“I.” Dylan is dizzy. He can’t lose it now. But what if Alex says—“I didn’t know about the bond.”

“The what?” Alex says, and oh, he didn’t know, either.

Stay up. Stay on your feet. Explain it. “I thought—I thought there were all these things you had to do to bond, and so I didn’t notice, and then I told you to—”

He can’t say it. Can’t say it if he’s right, and if he’s wrong—Dylan can’t even think about that.

“Dyl?” Alex says, and then his hand is on Dylan’s shoulder, and Dylan’s sinking under the touch, his knees folding under him.

Alex follows him down. Alex’s hands are on his shoulders, his upper arms, and it’s like a shot of sixty proof, the feeling of being held. Dylan can’t tell him. What if he pulls away?

“You make me so fucking terrified,” Dylan says.

“What?” Alex says. “I don’t want to, um.”

Alex’s hands are still on him. “I think…maybe I’ve been hurting you,” Dylan says.

He waits for Alex to take his hands away, but he doesn’t. Dylan lets his hands creep forward onto Alex’s knees, beggars at the feast. “Well,” Alex says after a minute. “I guess you have. But it’s not your fault. You don’t have to, like. It’s okay if you don’t—if you don’t want me back.”

Dylan chokes out a laugh. It’s just—Alex’s voice is so gentle, and it’s so ridiculous that Alex would say that, when Dylan—when Dylan—“Of course I want you,” he says, voice coming out strangled.

“But—”

“Alex,” Dylan says. It’s suddenly really important that he get this out, that he stop holding it in like a bomb about to explode inside his ribs. He’s hiding his face, curled down over Alex’s knees, the only way he can say it. “I want you so bad I’m fucking _dying._ ”

There’s a pause. Dylan feels the panic clamp down on him again. He can’t believe he said—and then Alex does take his hands away. Alex takes his hands away, and turns away, and doubles over. “Oh fuck,” he says. His voice sounds choked now. His voice sounds—“Oh fuck,” he says, and he’s lifting his face, and it’s tear-stained, and he’s smiling, and—

“Really?” Dylan breathes.

“Of course, you idiot,” Alex says, and he’s reaching for Dylan, and they’re reaching for each other, and they’re on the ground, holding each other so tightly Dylan feels like their bones will crack.

He never thought. He never thought Alex would react like that. Doesn’t quite believe it’s happening. But even if it’s not true, they’re holding onto each other, and he’s not letting go a single inch and neither is Alex.

Then Alex is loosening his grip a little, gentling it, carding a hand through Dylan’s hair, and maybe it _is_ true. Maybe Dylan isn’t alone in this. Something choked comes out of his mouth.

“I feel like we should—talk about some stuff,” Alex says, his voice almost shy. “Do you wanna, um. Maybe come lie down with me? On the bed?”

Dylan shudders all over. “ _Yes,_ ” he says.

The bed is rumpled, the covers pulled back and a warm indent in the middle where Alex was lying before Dylan got him up. Alex climbs back into that warm indent and pulls Dylan in with him and pulls the covers up over them. Dylan relaxes instantly, burrowing into Alex’s warmth and the scent that surrounds him.

He hasn’t been in this place for so long. Not since—not since June. He’s not sure how he lived for so long without it. Alex’s arm is around him, and it turns down the volume on the panicked clamor in the back of his mind. That achy spot in his chest he’d almost stopped noticing, the constant strain of questing, questing, questing, and never having.

They don’t need to talk. Dylan only needs to hold Alex forever like this. Or until the clamoring need in his chest settles down, until he feels like his body has rebuilt itself from the ruins. But that’s the bond, making him feel like that—and as soon as he thinks that, his stomach turns, because this isn’t perfect; he can’t just keep this. Can’t assume it’s what Alex wants. Especially not if—but he’s not thinking about that yet.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into Alex’s neck.

“For what?” Alex asks.

“I—” God, his mouth that close to Dylan’s ear is so good. Dylan should pull away for this, but he can’t. If he pulls away he won’t be strong enough to say it. “I think we might be bonded.”

Alex’s hand is sliding slowly up and down his back. Dylan’s body is greedy, wanting more, wanting all the things that aren’t his to take yet. “I don’t really know—what does that mean?”

“It’s a wolf thing,” Dylan says. “It means we’re, like, joined, but—I don’t think it’s forever, I think we can still—if you want. And maybe”—the panic is rising—“I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong—” The spot in his chest is aching, even with Alex wrapped around him.

“What would it feel like?” Alex’s hand is warm between his shoulder blades. “If we were.”

“We would be, um.” Dylan’s not sure he wants to describe this. It feels like exposing his underbelly. But Alex is pressed against him, all the parts of him protected. “We would maybe have trouble with, like, breathing and sleep and stuff. If we were apart. And, um—we might feel cold, and only warm when we’re touching each other—and if we couldn’t touch each other we’d feel terrible, like, shaky and sick, and it would mess up our ability to connect to other people—” Kaner said that, on the drive back. “And basically it would just be really bad, for both of us. If we weren’t—yeah.”

Dylan falls silent. He’s holding his breath, waiting. But Alex says in a low voice, “Yeah. That’s—yeah.”

Dylan lets his breath out. There’s a frantic scrabbling inside of him: _we’re bonded, we’re bonding, say yes, tell me you want it—_ he pushes it down. “I’m so sorry,” he whispers.

“But it’s not all bad, right?” Alex says. “I mean, if we’re not apart, it’s not bad. It’s a good thing. Right?”

“I mean, maybe, but I’m not sure you—” Dylan cuts himself off. This is the thing he was trying hardest not to think about on the drive back from the Kane-Toews estate. He doesn’t want to bring it up, not now when Alex is holding him and it feels so real and like something he gets to keep. But he has to say it. Can’t let himself not. “I think maybe the bond would have—made you feel some stuff,” he whispers. “What if you don’t really—what if it’s just the bond—”

Alex is quiet for a moment. Like he’s really thinking about it. Dylan doesn’t breathe; tries not to grab onto Alex too tight, to keep the worst from happening. “I mean, I don’t really know how it works,” Alex says. “But I’ve kind of felt like this for a while.”

“I think we’ve been bonded for a while,” Dylan says.

“Like, for years?” Alex says. “Because, uh.” He sounds—is he embarrassed? “I pretty much had a thing for you from, like, day one.”

Dylan isn’t sure what that means. “Like, day one of—of living together? Or…”

“Like, of always,” Alex says. “I had such a crush on you my first year with the Otters.”

“Really?” Dylan breathes. There’s no way that could be—but Alex wouldn’t make something like that up. Even if it’s ridiculous. Even if it’s so far-fetched Dylan almost can’t believe it. “ _Why?_ ”

Alex laughs against his temple. “You’re so—” He pulls back a little, and Dylan feels a twinge of fear, but Alex’s cheeks are pink and the way he’s looking at Dylan is almost enough to make him believe.

Alex lifts his hand off Dylan’s back and touches it to his cheek, quick, there and away. “I don’t know,” he says. “I saw you in the locker room, and you were so _you_ , and I just couldn’t help it.”

Something is soaring inside Dylan. “But you never smelled like it,” he says, aware as he’s saying it that it’s a dumb thing to say to a non-wolf. Most people don’t think in smells that way. “You never smelled turned on or anything.”

“Do I smell like I’m turned on by you right now?” Alex asks. His cheeks are definitely pink. “Because I am.”

Dylan pushes forward, putting his nose against the warmth of that neck. It’s—it’s a really good neck. He breathes in deep, that cocktail of smells that’s meant home to him for so many years now: rich toasted walnuts, the sharpness of hazelnut, the fresh green tang of cedar and the deeper hint of moss. That moss he started smelling more and more after they hooked up. But if that’s Alex turned on—

“Oh,” he says. “Oh.”

Alex’s eyes are closed as Dylan pulls back, the flush deeper on his cheeks. “I didn’t think you’d ever go for it,” Alex says. “I figured, you liked girls, and then when you wanted to try—”

“I didn’t know you wanted it,” Dylan says. “I thought you were just helping me out.”

“You fucking ruined me for sex with other people,” Alex says, laughing a little. “And then I thought, I shouldn’t let you live here, it’s too hard, but the idea of being without you, it was really—yeah.”

“Yeah,” Dylan whispers. There’s something inside of him that starts to shake just thinking about it. Something inside of him that hurts even now.

“But it seems like—it wasn’t as bad for me as it was for you?” Alex says, touching his hand to Dylan’s face again. “I’m not really sure how it was for you, but—”

Dylan makes a noise. He fights to keep it inside—and then he realizes he maybe doesn’t have to, that he doesn’t need to close himself off from Alex anymore. “It was so bad,” he says, and the breath is shuddering out of him. “Everything the past year and a half. It’s been so bad, fuck, I can’t—”

He’s shaking again, and Alex wraps his arms around him tight. “It’s okay,” Alex says, “I’ve got you, I’m not going anywhere—”

“We’re bonded,” Dylan says, desperately, half a question.

“We’re bonded,” Alex says, and the tight clenched thing in Dylan’s gut loosens. Just a little. The start of something. The feel of Alex’s arms around him, passing over and over all the bad things inside of him and wearing them away a little bit each time.

“I’m sorry,” Alex whispers to him. “I’m sorry it’s been so bad for you.”

“But—no,” Dylan says. Alex isn’t even a wolf, he—“You’re the one, it’s been hurting you—”

“We’ve been hurting each other,” Alex says. “But it’s okay, if we get to have each other now.” 

Dylan lets out his breath in a rush, like it’s been punched out of him. And then Alex tips his head a little, and his mouth is pressing soft and warm against Dylan’s.

It’s such a different kiss than they’ve ever had before. This kiss tastes like relief. Like wholeness. It tastes like that moment in Michigan when Dylan felt like they were a perfect circle of unity, only better, because Dylan doesn’t have to worry about it being broken now. Except—

“Wait,” he says, pulling away. “We can’t just—I could still get sent down. We could still be—”

“What are you talking about?” Alex asks.

“They might not keep me up,” Dylan says. He’s breathing hard again, and it’s not from arousal. “I know I’m playing better, but it might not be good enough, and then—”

“But we’re bonded,” Alex says, confused.

“I know.” The pit of panic is opening in Dylan’s chest again. “It’s gonna be so bad, fuck, Alex—”

“No, I mean, we’re bonded. They can’t trade you or send you down unless it’s both of us,” Alex says. “It’s in the CBA, remember?”

Dylan is still for a moment, uncomprehending. He vaguely remembers a rule, but he never thought—“Oh,” he says. “Oh fuck,” and Alex puts his arms around him again, and Dylan bursts into tears.

He sobs and sobs and can’t stop, everything he’s felt in the past two years pouring out of him. Alex holds him and doesn’t let go, his lips against Dylan’s hair.

They’re never going to be able to take Alex away from him again. They’re _never_ going to be able to take Alex away from him again.

Dylan sobs until there aren’t any sobs left, and then he falls asleep, spent and exhausted and safe, held in Alex’s arms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little bit left now. :)
> 
> Check out [my tumblr](https://linskywords.tumblr.com), where I've just made an exciting announcement!


	10. Chapter 10

When Dylan wakes up in the morning, he doesn’t quite trust his memory.

There’s an initial burst of joy. Alex is here. But Dylan’s woken up in beds with Alex before. Maybe this is one of those times—in Mississauga, in Michigan—but no, because last night was different. Last night Alex held him and said—

Alex is bonded to him. Alex—Alex is _his._

Alex is awake, lying with one arm around Dylan and the other holding his phone, and as soon as Dylan stirs he looks down and gives him a smile that makes Dylan’s stomach flip over.

“You’re here,” Dylan says, sleep-dumb and obvious, and Alex’s face gets even brighter and Dylan pulls him down and kisses him.

The kiss is different than the kiss last night. Last night Dylan felt drained, exhausted, and the night’s sleep with Alex has filled him up. He feels like he really slept for the first time in a year and a half. And now—now he _wants._

He kisses Alex, and Alex tastes so good, warm and responsive and everything Dylan’s wanted for so long. They kiss each other flushed and panting, and then Dylan goes to take Alex’s shirt off and Alex stops him. “Not yet,” he says.

Dylan’s so turned on it takes a moment for him to realize what Alex means. “What? We already—”

“But this is different,” Alex says. “We’re bonded now.”

Dylan’s pretty sure they were bonded then. At least a little. “What does that have to do with—"

“There’s stuff you’re supposed to do when you bond,” Alex says. “Ritual and stuff. Right?”

“Where are you even getting this?” Dylan asks.

“I Googled it,” Alex says. His mouth is on Dylan’s cheek, his breath hot on his skin, and he’s been lying here Googling how to complete their bond.

Dylan can’t believe this is his to keep.

“I mean, we don’t have to do it that way,” Alex says when Dylan doesn’t answer right away. “I don’t want to make you feel like we can’t—”

“No,” Dylan says. There’s definitely a part of him that wants to argue—a very insistent part—but Alex has been Googling how to complete their bond. Alex wants to do this right. “Let’s—yeah. We can do your thing. Yeah.”

Alex’s face dimples into this amazing smile. “Awesome,” he says, and then he’s rolling out of bed. “Then come on—let’s go walk Ralph.”

Dylan follows, a little dazed.

It’s bizarre, walking Ralph through the streets of Chicago after everything that’s happened between them in the past twelve hours. They can’t hold hands—not if they don’t want the whole world to figure it out already—but they keep looking at each other, this little grin on Alex’s face, and Dylan’s is sure his own grin is equally ridiculous. He keeps getting hit with it all over again: the idea that he can keep this. That Alex is _his._

It’s a really good idea to keep encountering. Dylan is giddy off it. He shoulder-checks Alex, like, every six steps.

Then they go back in, and Alex goes into the kitchen, stands at the counter where Dylan’s seen him stand so many mornings over the past month and a half. Only this time—

Dylan can’t quite believe it’s allowed. But he goes up and wraps his arms around Alex from behind, and Alex doesn’t stiffen, or move away, or tell him he can’t. He just makes an _mm_ sound and leans back against him, and yes. This.

Alex makes him breakfast. Dylan remembers this from going to bonding ceremonies when he was little: there was always a part where one of them made food for the other. It’s kind of weird, especially the part where Alex watches him eat, but also really nice in a way Dylan almost doesn’t want to admit. He never thought he’d be the one having this stuff done for him—he never really figured he’d do all the traditional stuff anyway, but if he did, it would be him doing the food-making part. Probably for some omega, a girl, the kind of person he used to think he’d end up with if he ended up with anyone at all.

He’s glad it turned out this way. But he keeps thinking about it while he’s eating, and by the time he’s done the thought has wrapped itself around him so much that he can’t not say something.

“So, this, uh,” he says when Alex has taken his plate. He doesn’t quite know what to say. Isn’t sure he wants to call attention to this at all. “This thing. I mean. Is this—is it weird?”

“What, the courting stuff?” Alex says. He’s at the sink, washing the dishes. “I don’t know, is it?”

“No, I mean.” Dylan squirms a little. He isn’t making himself clear at all. He remembers Alex’s arms around him last night: Alex isn’t going to run away if he says this. “It’s just, you know. Is it weird that I’m not doing, like, the alpha parts?”

“Oh.” Alex turns the water off and cocks his head thoughtfully. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about that. Sorry. I can—not, if you want.”

“No,” Dylan says quickly. “I mean—no.” His cheeks feel really hot. “Is it bad if I like it?”

Alex dries his hands and comes over to him. “I mean, _I_ don’t think so,” he says, grinning a little but obviously meaning it, and Dylan breathes in, a little shaky. It feels like such a dumb thing to worry about when he has Alex in front of him, fucking _bonded_ to him, but he was still—“I don’t care what kind of role you have as long as it’s the one you want,” Alex says, and Dylan buries his face in Alex’s shoulder and feels Alex’s arms go around him.

They have to leave the house mid-morning to go to practice. Dylan is getting his stuff together, trying to remind himself not to smile at Alex too obviously when they’re in front of the team, when he gets a text from Kaner. All it says is, _?????_

Fuck. Dylan kind of forgot about the thing where he told Tazer and Kaner a bunch of stuff without Alex’s permission. That…that might not be great.

“So, uh,” Dylan says once they’re in the car. “I might kind of have told some people about us. And by some people, I mean Kaner and Tazer. Sorry. I should have—sorry.”

“Oh,” Alex says. “Well, um, I might have told some people too.”

Dylan blinks at him. He’s not annoyed, exactly, it’s just—“ _When?_ ”

“Oh, no, not today.” Alex runs his hand up the back of his hair. “I, uh. The Team USA group chat might have gotten wind that I had some, uh, feelings.”

“Oh,” Dylan says. That—does make sense of some of the things Matt Tkachuk said to him.

He’s grinning again, without meaning to. It’s just—he still can’t believe Alex had the kind of feelings where he needed to tell people about it like that. He can’t believe he wasn’t alone in this.

He looks at Alex, driving, focusing on the road, but his face is happy in the way Dylan remembers from those weeks in the summer when they were in each other’s pockets: in Michigan, in Mississauga. Alex is happy, and it’s because of him.

“Maybe…maybe later we can tell some people,” Dylan says. “Like the Otters chat. Mitch and Davo and everyone.”

Alex’s face dimples in a helpless-looking smile. “Yeah. That sounds good.”

***

Practice goes well. Practice goes _really_ well. Like, practices have been pretty good with the Blackhawks in general, but Dylan feels like he’s moving at a different level in this one: like everything in his body is lining up in a way it hasn’t in so long. He hadn’t realized just how much everything had gotten off.

Kaner skates by him at one point and sings in an undertone, “Somebody got lai-aid,” and Dylan rolls his eyes and grins. It’s not even true, but it sort of feels like it is, anyway. He feels so much better than he did after any of the times he and Alex actually did have sex.

Not that he would say no to sex now. That would be…yeah. He wonders how much Alex wants to do of the traditional courting thing. It’s not a hard-and-fast list, more like a bunch of different options for gestures you can make. Gestures to show that you’re a good provider and that your intentions are serious and shit.

Dylan’s feeling pretty sold on all that, honestly. He’s feeling like there are some other ways Alex can show him how much he’s into this. 

It seems like Alex might be on the same page when they get into the car after practice. They’ve barely gotten the door shut when Alex is grabbing his face and kissing him, making Dylan gasp and slide his hands under Alex’s shirt. Then Alex pulls back and says, “You were so good out there. Your footwork, fuck, the way you got the puck around Tazer near the end there. You’re so fucking good at hockey, do you know that?”

Dylan’s trembling from the praise before it even occurs to him: praise. That’s one of the traditional courting steps, too.

That should maybe make it feel like less but it has the opposite effect, because he knows Alex means it and also it means Alex is displaying his intentions. He moans and leans in to lick at Alex’s neck. That’s two; they can stop at two, right? “So, uh,” he mumbles. “You wanna go home now?”

Alex kisses him: slow, deep, dizzying. “We have to do something first,” he says against Dylan’s mouth.

***

Alex takes him to Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

“Huh,” Dylan says. He was kind of expecting something more…he doesn’t know. The way Alex said it, it sounded more significant than an errand. But, whatever, he’ll go shopping.

Alex leads him through kitchenwares section: fancy blenders and food processors and other shit that neither of them really knows how to use. “Does the living room need more furniture?” Alex asks.

“I don’t know,” Dylan says. “What do you really need except a couch and a TV?”

“Fair point,” Alex says, and steers them to bedding, where he pokes at pillows and sheets for a while.

Dylan wanders over to look at towels while Alex shops. “What are you even looking for?” he asks after a while, when he gets tired of petting the extra-soft bath towels. As far as Dylan can tell, all Alex’s bedding is really good.

“What do you think of those towels?” Alex asks.

“They’re nice, feel.” Dylan holds out the extra-soft towel for Alex to touch.

“Okay, then that’s what we’re looking for,” Alex says, and scoops up a few in deep blue before Dylan knows what’s happening. He goes down the aisle and looks over his shoulder with a grin on his face, and oh.

“Oh,” Dylan says, lengthening his stride to catch up. So that’s what they’re doing here. This is something else that should be embarrassing, like the compliments, but mostly it makes him feel warm all over, scalp to toes. “You really don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, but I want to,” Alex says. “Anything else here you think you like?”

“I don’t know, I mean, I can just buy shit on Amazon,” Dylan says, and Alex kicks his ankle.

“Come on, we’re doing a thing here,” Alex says.

Dylan waves at the towels. “I thought that was the thing.”

“Yeah, but.” Alex shrugs, ducking his head a little. “More than that. I want, like—I want you to get whatever you want for the condo. I don’t want you to feel like it’s my place. I want it to be, you know. Ours.”

“Oh,” Dylan says again, and fuck Alex for saying that in a place where Dylan can’t kiss him. He’s all pink-cheeked again, and Dylan can barely breathe. Their place.

“Come on, let’s get the towels,” Alex says, and Dylan hooks a finger in the collar of his coat while they walk through bath supplies, brushing his finger back and forth against Alex’s skin.

It feels even better than the towels.

***

They make dinner together, which they’ve done before, but not this…deliberately. Dylan likes the feeling of moving around each other in the kitchen, having Alex tell him what to do, because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing in a kitchen. Alex only sort of knows, but he does the Blue Apron thing, so they have instructions to follow. They only waste a little bit of food flicking it at each other, and then a little bit more when Dylan feeds Alex a piece of cheese and Alex closes his mouth over Dylan’s fingers.

“So how long does this go on?” Dylan asks while they’re eating. “This courting thing, I mean.”

“I don’t know.” Alex’s legs are tangled up with his under the table. It adds this buzzing hum of closeness under everything. “Not, like, crazy long. There are just a few more things I want to make sure to do first.”

Dylan could ask. But Alex has this look on his face like he’s maybe looking forward to Dylan finding out on his own, so Dylan doesn’t. There’s something nice about Alex making him wait.

They do the dishes together after dinner instead of saving them for the cleaning service. Alex washes them and passes them to Dylan to dry, and there’s something—Dylan’s not sure. Maybe he’s making it up. But he feels like maybe he can feel when Alex is going to hand him something, like they’re even more in sync than they are when they’re on a line together on the ice, and he thinks, maybe. Maybe this is a bit of what the bond will be like when it settles.

Afterward they sit on the couch facing each other, Alex with his legs crossed in front of him and Dylan with his legs over Alex’s and wrapping around to meet behind Alex’s back. Which is maybe ridiculous but also it means they can both look at their phone screens together. 

“Is this dumb?” Dylan asks. “Like, it’s not like most of our friends tell us when they’re starting to date someone new or whatever.” He’s pretty sure Mitch has had at least three girlfriends in the last year, to judge by Instagram pics, and Mitch has never told him about any of them.

“Most of our friends aren’t dating each other,” Alex says, which, point. “Also…it’s not really like dating, is it? I mean.” He shrugs. “It’s not _not_ dating, obviously. And maybe I’m reading this bond thing wrong. But…we’d want to know if our friends were, like. Getting engaged, right?”

Dylan looks at him. Alex looks back.

It turns out that their legs folded over each other is _not_ the best position for kissing. But Dylan makes the best of it.

By the time they break apart, Alex’s lips are red and his eyes are bright and he’s grinning, pressing a few quick kisses against Dylan’s mouth in punctuation. “Okay, if we’re going to tell people things, we should not, uh. Do that.”

They tell the Otters chat first. Dylan wants to send them a picture, but Alex points out that they’re still hockey players, even if things have gotten easier over the last ten years, and they maybe want to be able to control how they come out. Instead they tell them they have news and make them guess.

 _you both got traded to the Lightning,_ Taylor sends.

 _dylan bit alex and now they’re both werewolves,_ Darren says.

 _douche. thats super not how it works,_ Fogey says, and they get a little derailed.

It’s Petty who gets it. _come on they obvs gave up the flirting and finally went for it,_ he says. _am i rite? guys?_

Dylan’s grinning really, really hard. _petty gets the cup,_ he types, and the guys all send millions of exclamation points and cheers emojis.

Connor isn’t on the group text, so Dylan calls him, Alex’s head near the phone. Connor actually answers; Dylan didn’t expect that. “Dude, what’s up?” Connor says. “It’s been like a million years.”

“Yeah, about that,” Dylan says. “I might have been kind of distracted by some shit.”

Connor’s more surprised than the guys on the Otters chat. But then, Connor wasn’t there for the years Dylan was slowly falling—off a cliff, it felt like, except it turned out not. “But, wow, congratulations,” Connor says, still sounding like he was struck in the face by a two-by-four. “I feel like I should, like, take you guys to dinner or something.”

“We’re there in a couple of weeks,” Dylan says. “You can make us food.”

“You’d better hope I get my meal service to do it,” Connor says. “I mean, I’m better than Hallsy and Ebs, but still.”

Mitch is the next call. It feels like it’s been even longer since Dylan’s talked to him. Dylan feels it again: the tingling of the parts of him realigning, the thing that was stoppering everything else cleared away. “Hey dude,” Mitch says, cheerful like always even though it’s been forever.

Dylan’s expecting him to be surprised, too—but he’s not expecting him to crack up.

Dylan and Alex give each other slightly alarmed looks, the phone held between them, while Mitch laughs. “Uh, you okay?” Dylan asks.

“Yeah, no, it’s just,” Mitch says. He sounds like he’s at the point of wiping tears from his eyes. “No, you remember that conversation we had about whether all wolves are gay?”

“Oh,” Dylan says, feeling himself flush. He’s pretty sure he didn’t know back then. But—that was after Alex came out to him, when Dylan was already a little too interested in it. He thinks maybe there are a lot of things he should have realized sooner. “I mean, I don’t actually think it’s _all_ wolves.”

“No, I know, but—no, I’ll tell you the rest when I see you,” Mitch says. “You’re coming out here in a couple of months, right?”

“Yeah, but you’d better tell me,” Dylan says.

“Don’t worry, I won’t forget,” Mitch says, giggling again.

Dylan hangs up, slightly mystified. That was…he doesn’t even know what to make of that.

Alex is looking thoughtful. “ _Are_ all wolves gay?” he asks, mouth quirking.

“No?” Dylan says. “I mean, I don’t even think _I’m_ gay, it’s more…”

“Hm?” Alex says.

Dylan tries to put his thoughts together. “I think it’s, like…different for wolves. Like, there’s stuff that smells right to us, and it doesn’t necessarily line up with, like, normal human sex stuff. So maybe it doesn’t even—apply? Like, me being into you was less about you being a guy, and more about you being, you know. You.”

It turns out that Alex in his lap is a much better position for kissing.

Finally Alex pulls back, panting, and says, “I guess we should tell our parents now, huh?”

Dylan would kind of be willing to not tell his parents right now. Not because he doesn’t want his parents to know. Just because Alex’s mouth is _right there_ and Dylan has some other ideas for things he could be doing with it.

“Let’s give it a minute,” he says. If he has to call his parents, he’s at least not doing it with a hard-on.

He assumes that sitting wrapped up with Alex won’t be great for getting rid of the hard-on, but actually it’s not that hard to transition from _must have you now_ to just…enjoying Alex next to him. The feel of him. The solidity. The rhythm of his breath, lining up with Dylan’s.

It occurs to Dylan that this is going to be his life. Like, the sex with Alex, but also the quieter moments, Alex just there next to him, twining through everything he does and making it complete, and fuck he really _does_ want to tell his parents this.

His mom answers on the third ring. “Hi, sweetie,” she says, and wow, has she always had this worried edge to her voice when she talks to him lately? Has he just not noticed, because he was so ragged himself?

“Hi, mom,” he says, and there must be something in his voice, too, because right away she says, “What’s happening? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I really am,” he says. He meets Alex’s eye, and Alex leans in and brushes a kiss on the notch of his collarbone. Dylan rests his chin on Alex’s head. “Just, remember at Christmas, when you thought maybe Alex and I had bonded?”

She’s _so_ happy for him. She’s so happy she starts crying, and then Dylan starts crying, and Alex lifts his head and kisses away Dylan’s tears. “Yeah, he’s here, you can talk to him,” Dylan says.

“Hello,” Alex says, serious, a little nervous-sounding. As if there’s any chance she’ll do anything but love him.

They talk to Dylan’s dad after that, and his brothers—“Ugh, do _not_ tell me any details about how it happened,” Ryan says when Dylan calls him, but Dylan can hear the smile in his voice. He’s starting to get the idea that maybe a lot of people have been worried about him over the past couple of years.

Then it’s Alex’s parents, and there’s a lot more questions about what it means to have a bond. Dylan feels a little uncomfortable about that part, since he’s the one putting this on Alex, but Alex takes his hand and squeezes it while he talks. “No, I—yeah, I feel like I got _really_ lucky,” he says, and Dylan leans in and nuzzles him.

They sit and hold each other after, letting it sink in: everyone knows. All the people who matter to them know that they’re together. “So was that one of the things?” Dylan asks. “Telling people?”

“Yeah,” Alex says. “I mean, not exactly, the thing on the list was about asking permission, or whatever. But I figured it was too late for that.”

No kidding. Apparently that horse left the barn a year and a half ago, and Dylan was just really slow to notice. “So, okay,” he says, rubbing the side of his head against Alex’s. “Does that mean we, uh—”

“Nah,” Alex says, which, argh. “But here, lie on your front.”

That’s a confusing set of statements. Dylan’s heart rate picks up a little anyway, because Alex is putting him on his belly; that _has_ to mean some kind of sex thing—but Alex straddles his waist and digs his thumbs into the muscles between Dylan’s shoulder blades.

“Oh fuck,” Dylan says involuntarily. He gets worked over by the people at the rink, obviously, but that’s supposed to be for injury prevention and all that medical shit. Alex’s hands on him are a whole different thing. Alex’s hands are warmth and connection and he digs his fingers into all the little knots and tender places and basically digs up the last year and a half of stress. Works it out of Dylan’s skin, one pass of his hands at a time.

“Something that feels good for the body that isn’t sex,” Alex says, his head low by Dylan’s ear. “That was on the list.”

Dylan just groans. This might not technically be sex, but it feels good enough that he thinks maybe the category should be expanded.

He feels like a limp rag after, and Alex makes him drink a bunch of water. “Okay, now you,” Dylan says.

“That’s not part of the thing,” Alex says.

“Okay, but what if _I’m_ the one who wants to, now?” Dylan asks, and Alex laughs. “Yeah, sure,” he says.

Dylan likes feeling Alex’s back relaxing under his hands. He likes exploring all the lines of his musculature, feeling like he’s getting to know it and to know what feels good. He likes feeling like he’s doing something to undo the year and a half of strain he put Alex through, too.

“I know I said it already, but I really am sorry,” he says after, when he’s lying next to Alex, both of them on their sides to fit on the narrow couch.

“For what? That felt fucking amazing,” Alex says, rolling his shoulders a little.

“No, I mean, I just—I kind of knew I was hurting myself, the last couple years,” Dylan says. “I didn’t know—no, I mean, I didn’t even really think about what I was doing to you.”

“It’s okay,” Alex says. “You’re here now.”

They go to bed together, pressed face to face, tucked into the warm envelopes of each other’s arms. It’s not sex, but fuck Dylan if it isn’t better than just about anything he’s ever had in his life.

***

“You had better fucking fuck me today,” he says the next morning, when he wakes up with raging morning wood and Alex just grins and gets out of bed.

Alex sticks his tongue out over his bottom lip. “We’ll see,” he says.

It’s a game day. They’re playing the Caps at home, skate in the morning, naps in the afternoon; not a lot of time for sexploits. “Can we even, like, play with blue balls this bad?” Dylan asks when Alex makes them stop making out to put their game-day suits on.

“We’ve both done it for the last year and a half,” Alex says with a smirk as he puts on the pants that just look way too good over his ass.

Dylan gives serious thought to jerking off in the bathroom before he leaves. But—he doesn’t want to. Not that he doesn’t want to come; but he wants the next time he comes to be with Alex. He doesn’t want to be separate from him for that, not right now.

The game feels like the practice yesterday, only better. He and Alex are on a line together, which hasn’t happened a ton in recent games, and Dylan wonders if Colliton, like, knows somehow. If Kaner told Tazer who told the coaching staff. Or maybe he could just tell by the way they’re moving around each other, the way there’s this thread between them that stretches and contracts, making them into a single unit on the ice. Whatever it is, Dylan hasn’t had this much energy and drive in a game in forever.

He scores for the first time in six games, off Alex’s pass. Then he gets two assists, one on Alex’s goal and one on Kaner’s, and they beat the Caps 8-5.

Dylan is fucking flying on it. The whole team is, coming off a string of five losses. He can’t help but feel like he and Alex are partially responsible for it—not that they scored most of the goals; that was Kaner and Tazer, actually, and Dylan can so clearly see what Tazer was saying the other night: they are much better when they’re together. And so are Dylan and Alex.

“Three points,” Alex says, beaming at him in the room after.

“Yeah, one more than you,” Dylan chirps.

“You are so _fucking_ good,” Alex says, voice dropping low, and Dylan feels like if anyone was looking at them right now, they wouldn’t have to decide to come out to the team. It’s written all over their faces.

Something is niggling at him, though. Dylan is starting to feel like maybe Tazer was right about the hockey stuff, that maybe Dylan was a few months out of date in thinking he was going to be a total failure—but there were other things Tazer said, too. Things that made Dylan think for the first time in a decade and a half about how much his hockey skill matters.

“Hey,” he says kind of abruptly in the car on the way home. “When you said you liked me your rookie year, what was it? Was it my hockey?”

“Well, you were obviously really good,” Alex says, and Dylan’s heart sinks a little. Not that he minds being noticed for his hockey; it’s just—

“But no, that wasn’t really it,” Alex says. “I don’t know. It wasn’t, like, one specific reason. I just saw you in the locker room, the way you were with all the guys, the way you were always joking with Davo—I don’t know if you knew the way you two were back then, but for about thirty seconds that year I thought maybe the two of you were dating. There was just something in the way you talked to him—and I saw it, and I just, I don’t know, I was jealous. I wanted you to look at me like that. Smile at me like that.”

“Oh,” Dylan says. His throat is thick. That’s—wow. “So it really wasn’t—”

“Dyl,” Alex says drily. “I love you, but you were on a team with Connor McDavid. If I was going to fall for someone for their hockey, not sure it was gonna be you.”

Dylan—Dylan isn’t actually listening anymore. Stopped listening pretty early in that statement. He knows Alex was just talking, it was just a figure of speech, but—“You love me?” he says, his voice scraping out of him.

“Oh,” Alex says. The tip of his ear, the one Dylan can see, is turning pink. “Um. Yeah. I really do.”

“Fuck,” Dylan says. They’re driving, this is such a stupid fucking time for this, Alex can’t even take his eyes off the road, but: “I love you too, obviously, like, it’s fucking ridiculous how much—” And Alex is biting his lip and easing the car up over the speed limit and Dylan has his hand clamped on Alex’s thigh and he’s tapping his heel on the floor mat and they’re almost home, almost, almost—

They get through the door and they’re already pulling their clothes off: tossing coats and suit jackets into the living room, grabbing each other to kiss, heavy, hungry, Alex bending Dylan down toward him and the heat of him coming through his shirt and pants. Dylan licks up his neck and Alex shudders in his arms and drags Dylan into the bedroom.

It’s not like the last time they had sex. It’s not even like the times before that, when Dylan wasn’t holding back as much. Those times he needed Alex to be holding him down to make him feel like he wasn’t going to spin away. Now he still feels a little bit like he will, but Alex anchors him with his presence alone. He’s here, and he’s looking at Dylan, and he’s touching him, and that means that Dylan can touch him back: can explore Alex’s body, touch him everywhere, lick him, bite. He finds out that Alex’s ears are really sensitive, and the hinge of his jaw, and that there are spots near his armpits that make him gasp. He finds out that he really likes to make Alex gasp.

Alex’s cock is curving up, thick and hard against his belly. Dylan slides down and puts his mouth on it.

Dylan’s never done this before, and he loves it immediately: the sharp tang on his tongue, the fullness in his mouth, the way it makes Alex jerk and curl up. Alex’s hands are in his hair, petting, pulling harder when the first tug makes Dylan moan. Dylan sucks and licks, working his hands over Alex’s stomach and thighs, until finally Alex says, “Stop—you gotta stop if you want me to—”

Dylan wants. Dylan really, really wants. He pulls off, panting.

Alex is slack-jawed and hazy-eyed, looking like something Dylan wants to look at forever, and—and maybe Dylan can. Maybe Dylan can look at him like this for years and years and years.

“Oh,” Dylan says, and he’s breathing harder, climbing up to press into Alex’s arms and kiss him, kiss him, let Alex kiss the fucking breath out of him.

Alex rolls over on top of him, his weight bearing Dylan down into the mattress, and now this is starting to feel more like that time in Michigan, where he was cocooned and held inside Alex’s warmth—but he didn’t know then. He didn’t know what the press of Alex’s body meant. He didn’t know Alex loved him.

“I’m going to knot again,” he whispers while Alex gets out the lube. Like, there’s no chance he won’t this time.

“Oh, fuck, yes,” Alex groans, stopping and letting his head hang down. “Do you know how many times I’ve jerked off to that?”

Dylan whimpers. Alex leans down and kisses them, and then his finger presses into Dylan and starts opening him up.

He already feels open—he feels more open than he’s ever fucking been by the time Alex pulls his fingers out. “What if—what if I don’t use a condom?” Alex says.

Fuck, the idea of Alex in him bare. “Yes,” Dylan says. “Yes. I haven’t—with anyone, not since Erie—”

Alex groans again at that, and Dylan should maybe not have admitted that, but Alex is kissing him again and then he’s pushing in.

Oh. It’s only been a month and a half but Dylan forgot how good this was. Or maybe it was never quite this good before: now he knows how much Alex wants it, and that makes it better. Now he’s getting fucked by his bondmate. He feels Alex’s presence all around and through him, sure as the skin on his own body.

“Alex,” he gasps, and puts his hands over Alex’s on the bed, holding on tight. Alex fucks into him and it’s like an electric charge moving in waves from his center outward. Dylan bucks into it, and Alex groans and moves harder, and Dylan is already losing it. It’s already hazy and too good to bear and please-God-give-me-more and Alex has barely given him two dozen thrusts.

Each thrust is so good it’s like an orgasm on its own. Each thrust builds on the one before it. Dylan locks his ankles behind Alex’s back and urges him on, and grabs Alex’s wrist and licks the sweat off it, and Alex gives him his fingers to suck and _oh fuck fuck fuck_ Dylan’s knot is popping _now._

He shoots between their bodies, hitting himself him on the underside of his chin, and Alex says, “Oh, wow,” sounding drunk and _fuck_ the feeling of his cock dragging past Dylan’s prostate while his knot is out. It feels a thousand times more intense and almost too much—and it would be too much except that Dylan can spread this feeling over two bodies, can put his hands on Alex’s shoulders and neck and hang on while he gulps desperately for air. Alex’s thrusts speed up and speed up and just when Dylan thinks he’s going to die or come again Alex arches back and shoot inside of him.

It’s like a burst of light, the feeling of Alex coming inside him. Dylan can feel it, and maybe that’s just his own pleasure, but he doesn’t think it is. It feels like Alex, connected to his body and his mind. So deep inside him that they’ll never be apart.

Dylan is panting and limp when Alex collapses on top of him. His knot is still up, and the pressure is so good when Alex’s weight falls on it. It’s even better when Alex shifts to the side and wraps his hand around the knot. His body is snug against Dylan’s, his tongue lapping at the come on Dylan’s neck. His hand tightens on Dylan’s knot and sends a wash of pleasure and security through Dylan’s body. Dylan…Dylan doesn’t know how he got this lucky.

“So,” Alex says a couple of minutes later. His hand is still massaging Dylan’s knot, little shock waves of goodness. “That thing at the end there. Was that—like, did you feel that?”

“Yeah.” It’s hard for Dylan to make his mouth move. He feels drunk on the sensation of Alex next to him. “I think that was us. The bond.”

“That’s…wow,” Alex says, and he could sound weirded out, but he only sounds pleased. In awe. “That’s, uh. I could get used to that.”

Dylan isn’t sure he’ll ever get used to that. But he wants to try. Wants it over and over and over again.

“So what else comes with this bond?” Alex asks, grinning at him. “Do I get to turn furry? Howl at the moon?”

“Pretty sure that’s all me,” Dylan says. “But I don’t know. Maybe we stay together long enough, we’ll find out.”

“Yeah, I’m on board with that,” Alex says. “Maybe the rest of our lives? How does that sound to you?”

His voice is light, but the look on his face isn’t. Dylan meets his eyes, and—there’s a part of him that’s been afraid for so long, that’s felt shaky and uncertain and has doubted everything, and when he looks at Alex that part isn’t there anymore. All he feels is Alex. The sureness that Alex will be next to him, in his mind and in his body; the trust that he will never go away. That they’ll be together, for as long as they both live.

“Yeah,” Dylan says, voice cracking. “Yeah. It’s a plan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for sticking with me through this epic journey! This is now...almost twice as long as the next-longest wolfverse story. :D And I STILL didn't get to everything I wanted to include, so I'm thinking a sequel is in the offing.
> 
> ([Tumblrrrrr](https://linskywords.tumblr.com)\--exciting announcement has been reposted!)


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